ABSTRACT
When speech is produced, it is usually directed towards a listener. Listeners must then effectively perform two main tasks on the speech signal if they are to understand it correctly. First, they must perceive or hear the signal and, second, decode or deconstruct it into its meaningful components. We can only fully understand individual words and longer utterances if we are able to perceive and categorize aspects of their articulatory make-up. For instance, we know that the word “skill” differs from “skull” because we can perceive the difference in the vowel and relate each of the words to a particular meaning.
