ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

2aSP3. Speech perception is hearing sounds, not tongues.

John J. Ohala

Dept. of Linguist., Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

Should the human or mechanical listener attempt to recover articulatory information when recognizing speech? The answer is ``no,'' with one qualification: listeners who need eventually to speak out loud the utterances they hear others make would be aided by figuring out what other speakers do with their vocal tracts but even in this case it may not be absolutely necessary. (There is also no dispute that the speech scientist wishing to understand how speech works needs to known the articulations giving rise to specific sounds.) The argument has three parts: (a) the phonologies of languages (e.g., their segment inventories, phonotactic patterns, etc.) unmistakably optimize sounds, not articulations; (b) infants and even various nonhuman species can differentiate certain sound contrasts in human speech even though it is highly unlikely that they can deduce vocal tract movements generating the sounds; (c) humans can differentiate many nonspeech sounds almost as complex as speech, e.g., music, machine noises, as well as bird and monkey vocalizations, where there is little or no possibility of recovering the mechanisms producing the sounds. 11:25\mCritique by Mary E. Beckman 11:35\mCritique by Douglas O'Shaughnessy 11:45\mCritique by Carol A. Fowler