ABSTRACT
Speech is at the heart of language. This chapter is about how we understand spoken words and continuous speech.
Speech perception is about how we identify or perceive the sounds of language, while spokenword recognition is about the higher level process of recognizing the words that the sounds make up. This convenient distinction is perhaps artificial. It could be that we do not identify all the sounds of a word and then put them together to recognize the word; perhaps knowing the word helps us to identify the constituent sounds. We may not even need to hear all the sounds of a word before we can identify it. The effect of wordlevel knowledge on sound perception is an important and controversial topic. By the end of this chapter you should:
• Understand how we segment speech. • Know how context is used in recognizing
speech. • Appreciate that we recognize a word at its
recognition point, but that the recognition point does not have to correspond to when the word
is first uniquely distinguishable from other, similar-sounding words.
