ABSTRACT
The fundamental problem in speech perception is to determine how the continuously varying acoustic stimulus produced by a speaker is converted into a sequence of discrete linguistic units by the listener so the intended message can be recovered. This problem can be broken down into a number of specific subquestions. For example, what stages of perceptual analysis intervene between presentation of the stimulus and eventual response? And what types of operations occur at each of these stages? What types of perceptual mechanisms are involved in speech perception, and how do they develop during the course of language acquisition? These are just a few of the broad questions that will be considered in the present chapter.
