The Perception of Speech, from Sound to Meaning

About this Book

• Brings together two often isolated lines of research to present a wide ranging exploration of speech and language processing - from phonetics and psycholinguistics to neuroimaging and neuroanatomy
• Written and edited by top researchers in the brain sciences, and presenting work from leading research centres throughout the world
• Shows how an approach that spans disciplines can help provide answers to the myriad of questions that remain unanswered in the field of speech communication

Spoken language communication is arguably the most important activity that distinguishes humans from nonhuman species. While many animal species communicate and exchange information using sound, humans are unique in the complexity of the information that can be conveyed using speech, and in the range of ideas, thoughts and emotions that can be expressed.

Despite the importance of speech communication for the entire structure of human society, there are many aspects of this process that are not fully understood. One problem is that research on speech and language is typically carried out by different groups of scientists working on separate aspects of the underlying functional and neural systems. On the one hand, research from an auditory perspective focuses on the acoustical properties of speech sounds, their representation in the auditory system, and how that representation is used to extract phonetic information. On the other hand, research from psycholinguistic perspectives examines the processes by which representations of meaning are extracted from the acoustic-phonetic sequence, and how these are linked to the construction of higher-level linguistic interpretation in terms of sentences and discourse. Till now, there has been relatively little interaction between speech researchers from these two groups, in spite of a dramatic expansion in recent years of research into the neural bases of auditory and linguistic functions.

This book bridges the gap between these two lines of research, recognising that both have the same aims in understanding how the motor gestures of a speaker are transformed to sounds and how those are mapped onto meaning in the comprehension of spoken language. It presents the work of leading researchers specializing in a wide range of topics within speech perception and language processing - along with contributions from key researchers in neuroanatomy and neuro-imaging. This important new work cuts through the traditional boundaries and fosters crossdisciplinary interactions in this important and rapidly developing area of the biological and cognitive sciences.

Readership: Cognitive and experimental psychologists/neuroscientists; audiologists; speech and language researchers

Table of Contents

1. Brian C J Moore, Lorraine K Tyler & William Marslen-Wilson: Introduction: the perception of speech: from sound to meaning
2. Eric D Young: Neural representation of spectral and temporal information in speech
3. Brian C J Moore: Basic auditory processes involved in the analysis of speech sounds
4. Randy L Diehl: Acoustic and auditory phonetics: the adaptive design of speech sound systems
5. Patricia K Kuhl: Early language acquisition: phonetic and word learning, neural substrates, and a theoretical model
6. Ruth Campbell: The processing of audio-visual speech: empirical and neural bases
7. Christopher J Darwin: Listening to speech in the presence of other sounds
8. Roy D Patterson & Ingrid S Johnsrude: Functional imaging of the audiotry processing applied to speech sounds
9. Lorraine K Tyler & William Marslen-Wilson: Fronto-temporal brain systems supporting spoken language comprehension
10. Peter Hagoort: The fractrionation of spoken language understanding by measuring electrical and magnetic brain signals
11. David Poeppel, William J Idsardi & Virginie van Wassenhove: Speech perception at the interface of neurobiology and linguistics
12. Robert J Zatorre & Jackson T Gandour: Neural specializations for speech and pitch: moving beyond the dichotomies
13. Michael K Tanenhaus & Sarah Brown-Schmidt: Language processing in the natural world

Author Information

Edited by Brian Moore, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK, Lorraine Tyler, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK, and William Marslen-Wilson, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK

Contributors:

Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana IL, USA
Ruth Campbell, Dept of Human Communication Science, University College London, UK
Christopher J Darwin, Dept of Psychology, University of Sussex, UK
Randy L Diehl, Dept of Psychology and Center for Perceptual Systems, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Jackson T Gandour, Dept of Speech Language & Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Peter Hagoort, F C Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
William J Idsardi, Dept of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park MD, USA
Ingrid S Johnsrude, Dept of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston ON, Canada
Patricia K Kuhl, Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle WA, USA
William Marslen-Wilson, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
Brian C J Moore, Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK
Roy D Patterson, Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, Dept of Physiology, University of Cambridge, UK
David Poeppel, Dept of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park MD, USA
Michael K Tanenhaus, Dept of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester NY, USA
Lorraine K Tyler, Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK
Virginie van Wassenhove, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA, USA
Eric D Young, Dept of Biomedical Engineering, Centre for Hearing and Balance, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, USA
Robert J Zatorre, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal QC, Canada