The following is a passage from our application for NATO­ sponsorship: "In the main, the participants in this workshop on the Psychophysics of Speech Perception come from two areas of research: - one area is that of speech perception researc,h, in which the perception of speech sounds is investigated; - the other area is that of psychoacoustics, or auditory psychophysics, in which the perception of simple non-speech sounds, such as pure tones or noise bursts, is investigated, in order to determine the properties of the hearing mechanism. Al though there is widespread agreement among both speech researchers and auditory psychophysicists that there should be a great deal of co-operation between them, the two areas have, generally speaking, remained separate, each with its own research questions, paradigms, and above all, traditions. Psychoacousticians have, so far, continued to investigate the peripheral hearing organ by means of simple sounds, regarding the preoccupations of speech researchers as too many near-empty theories in need of a more solid factual base. Speech perception researchers, on the other hand, have continued to investigate the way human listeners classify vowels and consonants, claiming that psychoacoustics is not concerned with normal, everyday, human perception.

Inhalt

1 The Relevance of Psychophysics for Speech Perception.- The role of psychophysics in understanding speech perception.- Central and peripheral processes in the perception of speech and nonspeech sounds.- Psychophysics versus specialized processes in speech perception: an alternative perspective.- Speech perception and the role of long-term memory.- Levels of representation of phonemes and bandwidth of spectral-temporal integration.- General discussion of session 1.- 2 Separation of Acoustic Events.- The meaning of duplex perception: sounds as transparant objects.- Perceptual separation of speech from concurrent sounds.- Sound separation and auditory perceptual organization.- On the significance of spectral synchrony for signal detection.- Auditory enhancement in speech perception.- General discussion of session 2.- 3 Dynamic Aspects.- Trading relations, acoustic cue integration, and context effects in speech perception.- Perceptual integration of rise time and silence in affricate/fricative and pluck/bow continua.- Reversal of the rise-time cue in the affricate/fricative contrast: an experiment on the silence of sound.- Possible acoustic bases for the perception of voicing contrasts.- Is there a natural sensitivity at 20ms in relative tone-onset-time continua? A reanalysis of Hirsh's (1959) data.- Auditory constraints on speech perception.- Studies of possible psychoacoustic factors underlying speech perception.- Perception of tone, band, and formant sweeps.- Psychophysical representation of stop consonant and temporal masking in speech.- Effects of stimulus dynamics on frequency discrimination.- Extending the search for a psychophysical basis for dynamic phonetic patterns.- General discussion of session 3.- 4 Timbre (Peripheral Constraints and Central Processes in the Perception of Complex Signals)..- Psychophysics of audio signal processing and the role of pitch in speech..- Does the human auditory system include large scale spectral integration?.- Some aspects of the sound of speech sounds.- Involvement of the critical band in identification, perceived distance, and discrimination of vowels.- Profile analysis and speech perception.- General discussion of session 4.- 5 Physiological Correlates of Speech Perception.- Peripheral auditory processing of speech information: implications from a physiological study of intensity discrimination.- Organization of the cochlear nucleus for information processing.- Changes in the phonemic quality and neural representation of a vowel by alteration of the relative phase of harmonics near F1.- Phase vowels.- Nonlinear responses, in the auditory nerve to vowel-related complex stimuli.- Discussion of physiological correlates of speech perception.- General discussion of session 5.- 6 Primary Speech Percepts.- English and French speech processing: some psycholinguistic investigations.- Units of organization and analysis in the perception of speech.- Implications from infant speech studies on the unit of perception.- General discussion of session 6.- 7 Psychophysics and Speech Perception in the Hearing-Impaired.- Relationship between psychophysical abilities and speech perception for subjects with unilateral and bilateral cochlear hearing impairments.- Speech-reception threshold in a fluctuating background sound and its possible relation to temporal auditory resolution.- Differences in listening strategies between normal and hearing-impaired listeners.- Critical bands in the perception of speech signals by normal and sensorineural hearing loss listeners.- Phase and the hearing-impaired.