ABSTRACT
The study of speech perception has been almost synonymous with the study of categorical perception. Categorical perception refers to a mode of perception by which changes along a stimulus continuum are not perceived continuously, but in a discrete manner (Studdert-Kennedy, Liberman, Harris, & Cooper, 1970). For example, listeners might be limited in their ability to discriminate differences between different speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme category. The sounds within a category can be identified only absolutely, and discrimination is possible for only those sounds that are identified as belonging to different categories. The current impression for much of the psychology is that speech is perceived categorically (J. R. Anderson, 1985; Eimas, 1985; Flavell, 1985; Miller, 1981). In this chapter, we examine the evidence for this point of view and find it to be unconvincing. Previous results and more recent studies are better described by the concept of continuous perception. Continuous perception refers to a relatively continuous relationship between changes in a stimulus and changes in the perceptual experience of that stimulus.
