Journal article
The myth of categorical perception
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.152(6), pp.3819-3842
12/2022
DOI: 10.1121/10.0016614
PMCID: PMC9803395
PMID: 36586868
Abstract
Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is widely known to be an artifact of task demands. CP is empirically defined as a relationship between phoneme identification and discrimination. As discrimination tasks do not appear to require categorization, this was thought to support the claim that listeners perceive speech solely in terms of linguistic categories. However, 50 years of work using discrimination tasks, priming, the visual world paradigm, and event related potentials has rejected the strongest forms of CP and provided little strong evidence for any form of it. This paper reviews the origins and impact of this scientific meme and the work challenging it. It discusses work showing that the encoding of auditory input is largely continuous, not categorical, and describes the modern theoretical synthesis in which listeners preserve fine-grained detail to enable more flexible processing. This synthesis is fundamentally inconsistent with CP. This leads to a different understanding of how to use and interpret the most basic paradigms in speech perception-phoneme identification along a continuum-and has implications for understanding language and hearing disorders, development, and multilingualism.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The myth of categorical perception
- Creators
- Bob McMurray - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.152(6), pp.3819-3842
- DOI
- 10.1121/10.0016614
- PMID
- 36586868
- PMCID
- PMC9803395
- NLM abbreviation
- J Acoust Soc Am
- ISSN
- 0001-4966
- eISSN
- 1520-8524
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100000055, name: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, award: DC 008089; DOI: 10.13039/100000055, name: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, award: DC 000242
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 12/2022
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders; Linguistics; Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute; Otolaryngology
- Record Identifier
- 9984355055802771
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