ABSTRACT
Our phenomenal experience in speech perception is that of categorical perception. Playing an auditory continuum between /ba/ and /pa/ by varying voice-onset time is an impressive demonstration. Students and colleagues usually agree that their percept changed from one category to the other in a single step or two with very little fuzziness in between. This author has a similar experience and, during an extended period of writing this book, heard certain German phonological categories in terms of similar English ones. Our phenomenal experience, however, is not sufficient to accept the notion of categorical perception. As noted by Marcel (1983b), phenomenal experience might be dependent on linking current hypotheses with sensory information. If the sensory information is lost very quickly, continuous information could participate in the perceptual process but might not be readily accessible for introspective reports. Reading a brief visual display of a word might lead to its recognition even though the reader is unable to report certain properties of the type font or even a misspelling of the word (McClelland, 1976). Yet the particular visual characteristics that subjects cannot report could have been functional in word recognition. Analogously, continuous information might have been functional in speech perception even though retrospective inquiry might imply the opposite. As in most matters of psychological inquiry, we must have methods to tap the processes involved in cognition without depending on only introspective reports.
