Speech Perception: BBS Multiple Book Review

[Stevan Harnad]

Below is the abstract of a book that will be multiply reviewed in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international,
interdisciplinary journal that provides Open Peer Commentary on important
and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive
sciences. Reviewers must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a 
current BBS Associate. To be considered as a reviewer for this book,
to suggest other appropriate reviewers, or for information about how
to become a BBS Associate, please send email to:
	 harnad at confidence.princeton.edu              or write to:
BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542  [tel: 609-921-7771]
____________________________________________________________________

              BBS Multiple Book review of:
SPEECH PERCEPTION BY EAR AND EYE: A PARADIGM FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL INQUIRY
        (Hillsdale NJ: LE Erlbaum Associates 1987)
     
              Dominic William Massaro
            Program in Experimental Psychology
           University of California, Santa Cruz

Keywords: speech perception; vision; audition; categorical perception;
connectionist models; fuzzy logic; sensory impairment; decision making

This book is about the processing of information, particularly in
face-to-face spoken communication where both audible and visible
information are available. Experimental tasks were designed to
manipulate many of these sources of information independently and to
test mathematical fuzzy logical and other models of performance and the
underlying stages of information processing. Multiple sources of
information are evaluated and integrated to achieve speech perception.
Graded information seems to be derived about the degree to which an
input fits a given category rather than just all-or-none categorical
information. Sources of information are evaluated independently, with
the integration process insuring that the least ambiguous sources have
the most impact on the judgment. The processes underlying
speech-perception also occur in a variety of other behaviors, ranging
from categorization to sentence interpretation, decision making and
forming impressions about people.
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