SPATIAL EXPLANATIONS OF SPEECH PERCEPTION: A STUDY OF FRICATIVES

This paper addresses issues of perceptual constancy in speech perception through the use of a spatial metaphor for speech sound identity as opposed to a more conventional characterisation with multiple interacting acoustic cues. This spatial representation leads to a correlation between phonetic, acoustic and auditory analyses of speech sounds which can serve as the basis for a model of speech perception based on the general auditory characteristics of sounds. The correlations between the phonetic, perceptual and auditory spaces of the set of English voiceless fricatives /f $\theta$ s $\int$ h / are investigated. The results show that the perception of fricative segments may be explained in terms of 2-dimensional auditory space in which each segment occupies a region. The dimensions of the space were found to be the frequency of the main spectral peak and the 'peakiness' of spectra. These results support the view that perception of a segment is based on its occupancy of a multi-dimensional parameter space. In this way, final perceptual decisions on segments can be postponed until higher level constraints can also be met.