ABSTRACT
In face-to-face communication, the perceiver both sees and hears the speaker. The goal of the research reported in this book is to develop a psychological description of how the perceiver recognizes what the speaker says. Given the preceding century of psychological inquiry, it would not be inappropriate to bypass metatheoretical and methodological preliminaries and to get on with it. The hypotheses, experimental tests, and analyses stand on their own merit and reduce uncertainty about the processes involved in bimodal speech recognition. Preliminaries are necessary, however, because the relevance of the research stretches well beyond understanding speech perception into diverse domains of perceptual and cognitive performance. The goal of the book, therefore, is more ambitious than the goal of the research because the book confronts fundamental issues in experimental psychology and cognitive science, as well as the information and processes supporting speech perception. To set the stage for the research and to illustrate its relationship to extant issues, an important theoretical (or perhaps metatheoretical) principle is presented and evaluated.
