ABSTRACT
Decades of research on the perception of speech sounds has winnowed this area of complex auditory perception down to several critical focal issues around which much of modern research on speech perception is organized. These issues are linearity, acoustic invariance, and segmentation. The failure of basic psychoacoustics to adequately account for these phenomena point to the necessity of invoking higher order, “top-down” influences on perception. The efficiency with which speech is processed by the human auditory system has led to the notion that a special “speech mode” is involved.
