| | |
Summary: Brief article
Perception of speech reflects optimal use of probabilistic speech cues
Meghan Clayards *, Michael K. Tanenhaus, Richard N. Aslin, Robert A. Jacobs
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Meliora Hall, Rochester, NY 14627, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 14 December 2007
Revised 16 April 2008
Accepted 25 April 2008
Keywords:
Speech perception
Word recognition
Ideal observer model
Categorization
a b s t r a c t
Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories
for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic
nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic
cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial stops in English (e.g.,
``beach" and ``peach"). Participants categorized words from distributions of VOT with wide
|
