Although speech is the primary behavioral medium by which humans communicate, its auditory basis is poorly understood, having profound implications on efforts to ameliorate the behavioral consequences of hearing impairment and on the development of robust algorithms for computer speech recognition. In this volume, the authors provide an up-to-date synthesis of recent research in the area of speech processing in the auditory system, bringing together a diverse range of scientists to present the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. Of particular concern is the ability to understand speech in uncertain, potentially adverse acoustic environments, currently the bane of both hearing aid and speech recognition technology. There is increasing evidence that the perceptual stability characteristic of speech understanding is due, at least in part, to elegant transformations of the acoustic signal performed by auditory mechanisms. As a comprehensive review of speech's auditory basis, this book will interest physiologists, anatomists, psychologists, phoneticians, computer scientists, biomedical and electrical engineers, and clinicians.

Although speech is the primary behavioral medium by which humans communicate, its auditory basis is poorly understood, having profound implications on efforts to ameliorate the behavioral consequences of hearing impairment and on the development of robust algorithms for computer speech recognition. In this volume, the authors provide an up-to-date synthesis of recent research in the area of speech processing in the auditory system, bringing together a diverse range of scientists to present the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. Of particular concern is the ability to understand speech in uncertain, potentially adverse acoustic environments, currently the bane of both hearing aid and speech recognition technology. There is increasing evidence that the perceptual stability characteristic of speech understanding is due, at least in part, to elegant transformations of the acoustic signal performed by auditory mechanisms. As a comprehensive review of speech's auditory basis, this book will interest physiologists, anatomists, psychologists, phoneticians, computer scientists, biomedical and electrical engineers, and clinicians.

The human species is largely defined by its use of spoken language, so integral is speech communication to behavior and social interaction. Despite its importance in everyday life, comparatively little is known about the auditory mechanisms that underlie the ability to understand language. The current volume examines the perception and processing of speech from the perspective of the hearing system. The chapters in this book describe a comprehensive set of approaches to the scientific study of speech and hearing, ranging from anatomy and physiology, to psychophysics and perception, and computational modeling. The auditory basis of speech is examined within a biological and an evolutionary context, and its relevance to applied domains such as communication disorders and speech technology discussed in detail. This volume will be of interest to scientists, engineers, and clinicians whose professional work pertains to any aspect of spoken language or hearing science.

A message from a speaker to a listener has to travel a very long way, from an intention on the part of the former, via an acoustic signal, through the transducer stages of the peripheral auditory system. The present book is about the listener. It consists of 35 papers by researchers from a limited number of related fields between the auditory periphery and word recognition, who met in 1991.

Spoken language communication is arguably the most important activity that distinguishes humans from nonhuman species. While many animal species communicate and exchange information using sound, humans are unique in the complexity of the information that can be conveyed using speech, and in the range of ideas, thoughts and emotions that can be expressed. Despite the importance of speech communication for the entire structure of human society, there are many aspects of this process that are not fully understood. One problem is that research on speech and language is typically carried out by different groups of scientists working on separate aspects of the underlying functional and neural systems. On the one hand, research from an auditory perspective focuses on the acoustical properties of speech sounds, their representation in the auditory system, and how that representation is used to extract phonetic information. On the other hand, research from psycholinguistic perspectives examines the processes by which representations of meaning are extracted from the acoustic-phonetic sequence, and how these are linked to the construction of higher-level linguistic interpretation in terms of sentences and discourse. Till now, there has been relatively little interaction between speech researchers from these two groups, in spite of a dramatic expansion in recent years of research into the neural bases of auditory and linguistic functions. This book bridges the gap between these two lines of research, recognising that both have the same aims in understanding how the motor gestures of a speaker are transformed to sounds and how those are mapped onto meaning in the comprehension of spoken language. It presents the work of leading researchers specializing in a wide range of topics within speech perception and language processing - along with contributions from key researchers in neuroanatomy and neuro-imaging. This important new work cuts through the traditional boundaries and fosters crossdisciplinary interactions in this important and rapidly developing area of the biological and cognitive sciences.

An integrated overview of hearing and the interplay of physical, biological, and psychological processes underlying it. Every time we listen—to speech, to music, to footsteps approaching or retreating—our auditory perception is the result of a long chain of diverse and intricate processes that unfold within the source of the sound itself, in the air, in our ears, and, most of all, in our brains. Hearing is an "everyday miracle" that, despite its staggering complexity, seems effortless. This book offers an integrated account of hearing in terms of the neural processes that take place in different parts of the auditory system. Because hearing results from the interplay of so many physical, biological, and psychological processes, the book pulls together the different aspects of hearing—including acoustics, the mathematics of signal processing, the physiology of the ear and central auditory pathways, psychoacoustics, speech, and music—into a coherent whole.

Mechanisms of Speech Recognition explores the mechanisms underlying speech recognition. Topics covered include the auditory system, speech production, auditory psychophysics, speech synthesis and analysis, vowel and consonant recognition, and perception of prosodic features and of distorted speech. Automatic speech recognition and models of speech recognition are also given consideration. This volume consists of 11 chapters and begins with an overview of speech recognition, communication, and production. More specifically, it examines the way in which the organs of the vocal apparatus are employed to transform a message consisting of a string of linguistic units, such as words or phonemes, into a wave of continuous sounds which are recognized as speech. The auditory system and its parts are then described, from the ears to the organ of Corti and nerve cells. The chapters that follow focus on the behavior of the hearing system, the various techniques of analyzing speech sounds, and speech synthesizers such as vocoders. The mechanisms underlying the recognition of vowels and consonants are also described, along with the physical parameters of the speech wave which signal the prosody of an utterance, the effects of distortions in the speech wave on speech perception, and tools used in automatic speech recognition. The book concludes with an evaluation of models of speech recognition. This book will be of interest to phoneticians, linguists, physiologists, psychologists, and physicists.