Speech perception

Speech perception is studied by various disciplines. Linguistic and phonetic, research inevitably involves the investigation of perception and comprehension as parts of the entire communicative chain. Works on this topic, steadily increasing since the 1950's, exhibit an articulatory-acoustic- perceptual approach. However, no unambiguous, language-specific description of the speech perception process is yet available. The author, who is a senior researcher in the Department of Phonetics, Institute of Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, discusses speech perception in general and applies her findings to practical fields. In particular, she investigates (i) the working mechanisms of perception ( including problems like the elementary perceptual unit, the role of levels in a hierarchical model, alternative models of speech perception, invariance, word detection, etc. ); (ii) the perceptual properties of Hungarian speech sounds and suprasegmental elements; (iii) characteristics of the process of lexical access, as well as (iv) the development of perception in young children, she (v) describes the application of the results obtained. The experimental results encouraged the author to apply her findings to areas where the speech perception and comprehension process is of crucial importance. Thus she developed two test series in order to assess children's hearing, speech perception, comprehension and some related abilities ( e. g. short-term memory, handiness, orientation ). One of them is the G-O-H system using high-quality synthetic speech which estimates the functioning of the hearing mechanism. Its advantages are especially obvious where the traditional methods are unsatisfactory or their results are vague. The other one - called GMP - is an age-specific test-package and serves for assessing the speech perception/comprehension level of normally developed children ( ages 3 to 10 ). The last chapters of the book contain results of the author's tests with hundreds of children based on these methods. The work's primary importance is that for eventually establishing a language-independent symbolic model of speech-perception, it is vital to have reliable descriptions of language-specific characteristics of the process. Another aspect that deserves attention is the way the author applies her theoretical/experimental results to a practical problem of high importance, namely the examination of the hearing and speech perception level of young children.