ABSTRACT
Speech perception is the process whereby a listener interprets a stream of sound as a sequence of linguistic units. There are two major problems that confront the investigation of speech perception:
The process is a mental one, so it is not directly observable.
We don’t know what the linguistic units are, that is, the units that form the immediate objects of perception in speech. They could be phonemes, or they could be smaller phonetic “building blocks” (known as distinctive features), like “nasal,” “fricative,” and “voiced.” Or perhaps the listener immediately perceives the stream of sound as a sequence of syllables, or even whole words.
