On the Nature of Categorical Perception of Speech Sounds.

Current theories of speech perception emphasize that the perception of speech sounds may involve processes that are in some way basically different from the processes involved in the perception of other sounds. One finding is a difference in perception between synthetic stop consonants and steady-state vowels. The primary goal of the investigation was to examine the differences between categorical and continuous perception and to evaluate three different explanations for the phenomena of categorical perception. Six experiments are reported.