Thursday, August 20, 2009

Speech perception happens in the auditory system

I know this sounds like an outlandish claim given the current motor-oriented neuroscience culture, but I really do think that speech perception is something that is achieved in the auditory system. I try not to say this too loudly around auditory people because they just laugh. "Really? You're claiming that perceiving speech sounds is a function of the auditory system? Brilliant. I never would have thought of that."

I've spent enough time publicizing and critiquing paper that argue for motor involvement in speech perception. Now I'd like to point out some of the papers put out there by the folks who argue from an auditory perspective. These don't usually get published in high profile neuroscience journals so they can fly under the radar of the neuroscience crowd. So here are two good papers, one which provides a very brief overview, and another a more in depth review. Definitely required reading for anyone interested in studying speech perception:

Diehl, R., Lotto, A., & Holt, L. (2004). Speech Perception Annual Review of Psychology, 55 (1), 149-179 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.142028

Holt, L., & Lotto, A. (2008). Speech Perception Within an Auditory Cognitive Science Framework Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17 (1), 42-46 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00545.x

1 comment:

Fred said...

Not quite about speech perception, but rather the phonetic/phonological form of lexical entries, one of my favourite papers arguing (on the basis of a review of neuro(psych) lit) for an acoustic/auditory approach is a bit of an oldie:

Coleman, J. (1998).Cognitive Reality and the Phonological Lexicon: An overview. J. Neurolinguistics, Vol.11, No.3. pp.295-320

Great blog, btw!