Perception

Perception refers to any kind of conscious sensory experience whereby external stimuli generate electrical signals in the nervous system of an organism that ultimately allow some kind of interaction with the environment. In human communication, the external stimulus is usually a spoken acoustic signal, and the receiving organism is typically a human listener. The auditory system of the listener transduces this sound into neural impulses in the brain, which are then processed at several stages. The traditional view of speech perception is that the acoustic signal from a speaker is perceived as a sequence of consonants and vowels which are further organized into words and sentences. However, the acoustic waveform contains information about not only basic linguistic elements but also nonlinguistic properties such as the ...