Auditory Phonetics

This entry discusses auditory phonetics, also called speech perception, and its focus on the listener and the receptive side of the speech communication chain. Auditory phonetics concerns the mental and physical processes involved in understanding all information carried in the acoustic speech signal. These perceptual processes include mapping speech segments onto abstract phoneme categories, matching them to words in the mental lexicon, recognizing indexical properties of the speaker, and overcoming the effects of noise and competing cognitive demands.

Research in this area has to do with how the acoustic speech stream is processed and mapped onto meaningful, abstract linguistic units by human listeners. Auditory phonetics has been a strong area of research for many decades and continues to inform understanding of human language and cognition and ...