Efthymia Kapnoula

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain & Language

 

Abstract

Listeners discriminate speech sounds from different phoneme categories better than equivalent acoustic differences within the same category - an empirical phenomenon widely known as Categorical Perception. Based on this phenomenon, it has been hypothesized that listeners perceive speech categorically, i.e., ignoring within-category differences. Despite the long prevalence of this idea in the field, there is now mounting evidence that listeners perceive speech sounds in a gradient manner and that they use subphonemic information to flexibly process speech. In addition, recent work on individual differences in speech perception has shed light onto the sources of this speech perception gradiency, as well as its functional role in spoken language processing. In this talk, I will present some key findings from this literature and briefly discuss some on-going work and future directions.