Paper: Phonological Representations in Speech Perception

[Gareth Gaskell]

FTP-host: archive.cis.ohio-state.edu
FTP-filename: /pub/neuroprose/gaskell.phonrep.ps.Z

The following paper (28 pages) is available in the neuroprose archive. This
paper is due to be published in Cognitive Science and examines the 
phonological representations and processes involved in the perception of
speech from a connectionist viewpoint.

A Connectionist Model of Phonological Representation in Speech Perception
Gareth Gaskell, Mary Hare & William Marslen-Wilson

Abstract:

A number of recent studies have examined the effects of 
phonological variation on the perception of speech. These studies 
show that both the lexical representations of words and the 
mechanisms of lexical access are organized so that natural, 
systematic variation is tolerated by the perceptual system, while a 
general intolerance of random deviation is maintained. Lexical 
abstraction distinguishes between phonetic features that form the 
invariant core of a word and those that are susceptible to variation. 
Phonological inference relies on the context of surface changes to 
retrieve the underlying phonological form. In this paper we present 
a model of these processes in speech perception, based on 
connectionist learning techniques. A simple recurrent network was 
trained on the mapping from the variant surface form of speech to 
the underlying form. Once trained, the network exhibited features 
of both abstraction and inference in its processing of normal speech, 
and predicted that similar behavior will be found in the perception 
of nonsense words. This prediction was confirmed in subsequent 
research (Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1994).

To retrieve the file:

ftp archive.cis.ohio-state.edu
login: anonymous
password:<email address>
ftp> cd /pub/neuroprose
ftp> binary
ftp> get gaskell.phonrep.ps.Z
ftp> bye
uncompress gaskell.phonrep.ps.Z
lpr gaskell.phonrep.ps [or whatever you normally do to print]

Gareth Gaskell
Centre for Speech and Language,
Birkbeck College,
London

g.gaskell at psyc.bbk.ac.uk