Investigation into the effect of the Automatic Speech Processing on categorical perception

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26884051
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Sophia University
• Principal Investigator: TOMARU Kanako 上智大学, 理工学部, 研究員 (40735990)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-08-29 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: カテゴリー知覚 / 日本語音声 / /ba/-/da/連続体

Outline of Final Research Achievements

People perceive speech sounds according to a unit called “phoneme.” For example, when native speakers of English hear a set of sounds that continuously changes from the /r/ phoneme to the /l/ phoneme, there is a point where they suddenly hear /l/ instead of /r/. The point is called "categorical boundary," and people tend to be sensitive to the difference between stimuli that stride over this boundary. This type of perception is called “categorical perception.” Study of categorical perception traditionally concerns only perception of small units of sounds such as mono-syllabic words. However, in ordinary conversation settings we normally listen to speech sounds in units that are longer than word, i.e., phrase and sentence. Purpose of the present study is to investigate categorical perception during sentence perception.

Free Research Field

音声学、音韻論、心理言語学