ABSTRACT
In summary, there is clearly some advantage to recognizing speech in context compared with speech out of context and non-speech sounds. What is this advantage?
rate (Miller, 1981). The “b” sounds in “ball,” “bill,” “able,” and “rob” are acoustically distinct. This sort of acoustic variability makes phoneme identification a complex task, as it means that they cannot be identified by comparison with a “perfect exemplar” of that phoneme, called a template. There is an analogy with recognizing letters; there are lots of perfectly acceptable ways of writing the same letter. This variation is most clear in the context of different phones that are the same phoneme in a language, such as aspirated and unaspirated /p/ (see Chapter 2). Yet we successfully map these different phones onto one phoneme.
