Introduction to the Psychology of Speech Perception

3 units

From an engineering standpoint, the ability to understand spoken language should not be possible and the difficulty of understanding speech is readily apparent in the thousands of programs designed to transcribe spoken input. Although some have reasonably good accuracy, none can come close to the performance of a human listener. In fact, for humans, speech perception seems like an automatic process. In this course, we will examine the sensory, cognitive, and combined sensory-cognitive abilities necessary for accurate speech perception. We will also discuss and critically evaluate current theories and models of speech perception and how they apply to different populations (e.g., individuals with hearing loss, older adults). Finally, students will gain hands-on experience in the laboratory by analyzing speech signals. The course begins by considering the acoustic speech signal, and how the structured nature of acoustic variation informs perception. We will then tum to experimental work on speech perception that shows there is not a simple mapping between acoustic properties and linguistic percept; rather, there is both a many-to-one and one-to-many mapping between acoustic speech information and linguistic perception. We will also consider the dominant theories of speech perception and theoretical issues that have driven speech perception research for over 60 years, including the foundational question of whether speech perception differs from other types of auditory processing. We will end the course with a discussion of several special populations, all of whom have difficulty with speech perception, but allow us to examine the relative importance of sensory and cognitive abilities. A theme throughout the course is that students are introduced to the relation between theory and experimentation.