Abstract:

A classic statement of the speech perception problem is how to account for the perception of phonemes based on the acoustic stimulus. A classic statement of the word recognition problem is how to account for the access and selection of lexical representations, with little concern for phoneme/phonetic perception. Over the past two decades, research in spoken-word recognition has begun to explicitly model the stages of word recognition in terms of phonetic/phonemic perception and later stages involving lexical knowledge. These different models incorporate very specific proposals for the interaction of information from the bottom-up stimulus and the lexicon. They also raise issues concerning the appropriate model for phoneme perception, that is, for example, does it precede or follow the lexical processing stage? It would be convenient if theories/models of phoneme perception could ignore effects of the lexicon, and therefore, autonomously account for the ``front-end'' of word recognition. But can they, and be adequate theories/models of either phoneme perception or the front-end to word recognition? Alternatively, are there phoneme identification effects that are irrelevant to word recognition? In this session, researchers representing a variety of perspectives on the true relationship between lexical processes and phoneme/phonetic perception are brought together.