The psycholinguistic branch of speech perception research is principally concerned with the study of spoken-word recognition. As a separate area of research, spokenword recognition boasts a scant quarter-century of history. Nonetheless, the field has grown and changed in many ways d in ing that time. This brief essay makes no a t tempt to survey the field, or to isolate its principal current co...

It is well-documented that children comprehend many more words than they are able to produce. Without exception, a child appears to understand various words that they do not use in their own speech. These results are used to test three different theories of speech perception. Motor theory assumes that motor processes are necessarily recruited for speech perception. A common representation theor...

In different tasks involving action perception, performance has been found to be facilitated when the presented stimuli were produced by the participants themselves rather than by another participant. These results suggest that the same mental representations are accessed during both production and perception. However, with regard to spoken word perception, evidence also suggests that listeners...

Motor involvement in speech perception has been recently studied using a variety of techniques. In the current study, EEG measurements from Cz, C3 and C4 electrodes were used to examine the relative power of the mu rhythm (i.e., 8-13 Hz) in response to various audio-visual speech and non-speech stimuli, as suppression of these rhythms is considered an index of 'mirror neuron' (i.e., motor) acti...

The development of auditory-visual speech perception was investigated in pre-school children, school children and adults. Results show a link between auditory-visual speech perception and language-specific speech perception in school children. In addition it was found that speechreading ability in early childhood was predicted by cognitive abilities. Additionally, adults’ and preschool children...

Disorders of music and speech perception, known as amusia and aphasia, have traditionally been regarded as dissociated deficits based on studies of brain damaged patients. This has been taken as evidence that music and speech are perceived by largely separate and independent networks in the brain. However, recent studies of congenital amusia have broadened this view by showing that the deficit ...

The influence of speech production on speech perception is well established in adults. However, because adults have a long history of both perceiving and producing speech, the extent to which the perception-production linkage is due to experience is unknown. We addressed this issue by asking whether articulatory configurations can influence infants' speech perception performance. To eliminate i...

This paper discusses the importance of silent pauses in the perception of prosodic boundaries in Korean speech. It is suggested that in speech in general, and in particular in spontaneous speech, silent pauses are neither necessary nor sufficient for the perception of prosodic boundaries. In read speech, however, there is a high correlation between the presence of a pause and the perception of ...

Categorical perception occurs when a physical continuum is perceived discontinuously. In speech, a vast body of research has shown that consonants are perceived categorically whereas vowels are perceived continuously. The other major phonetic unit of speech, lexical tone, has been relatively neglected in categorical perception studies. Here tonal language (Thai), and non-tonal language (Austral...