Perceptual Independence in the Perception of Speech

Abstract

The purpose of the experiments and analyses was to discover whether the “independence” model, which successfully accounts for the perception of synthetic multi-dimensional stimuli, would also describe the perception of speech in noise. Two sets of four words were chosen which could be considered phonetically to be describable in terms of two dimensions. The S/R matrix was analysed as if the stimuli were bi-dimensional elementary stimuli. Satisfactory fits were obtained by the independence model. Two analyses were conducted upon data from Miller and Nicely (1955) and Conrad (1964) to discover whether the perception of phonemes was also predictable on the independence model. In general this was found to be the case.