Authors:

Norris, D.G. & Cutler, A.

Reference:

Year of publication:

1985

CBU number:

1771

Abstract:

The “units of perception” hypothsis has led psycholinguists to concern themselves with units of classification rather than with the more important process of speech segmentation. This paper argues that segmentation rather than classification of the speech signal is the primary process in speech perception. We show that a universal process of juncture detection has a vital role to play in assisting lexical segmentation and phonetic analysis and can account for processing differences between French and English which might otherwise be taken as evidence that different perceptual units aare involved in the perception of different languages.