Constraints Imposed by the Auditory System on the Properties Used to Classify Speech Sounds: Data from Phonology, Acoustics, and Psychoacoustics

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews some of the psychophysical data and acoustic data that shed light on how the peripheral auditory system creates some form of representation of the speech signal. There are two motivations for engaging in this kind of activity. The first is simply to gain an understanding of how speech signals are processed in the peripheral auditory system, so that one can know what aspects of the signal become distinctive or highlighted in an auditory representation, and what aspects become suppressed. A second, and perhaps more fundamental, motivation is to gain some insight into how the constraints imposed by the auditory system shape the inventory of sounds that are used in language, and how the auditory processing imposes a classificatory structure on the sounds - a structure that plays an important role in determining the organization of the phonological component of language. The chapter first considers the kinds of data planned to be used as evidence, and how to interpret these data, before proceeding to discuss specific evidence for peripheral constraints on the auditory representation. One of these kinds of data comes from acoustic measurements on speech sounds, and the other comes from studies of the perception of speech and speech-like sounds.