Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Psycholinguistics: an overview
- 2 Language and cognition
- 3 Processes in language production
- 4 Language perception
- 5 The mental lexicon
- 6 Where learning begins: initial representations for language learning
- 7 Second language acquisition
- 8 Neurolinguistics: an overview of language–brain relations in aphasia
- 9 The biological basis for language
- 10 Linguistics and speech–language pathology
- 11 The evolution of human communicative behavior
- 12 Linguistics and animal communication
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Contents of Volumes I, II, and IV
4 - Language perception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Psycholinguistics: an overview
- 2 Language and cognition
- 3 Processes in language production
- 4 Language perception
- 5 The mental lexicon
- 6 Where learning begins: initial representations for language learning
- 7 Second language acquisition
- 8 Neurolinguistics: an overview of language–brain relations in aphasia
- 9 The biological basis for language
- 10 Linguistics and speech–language pathology
- 11 The evolution of human communicative behavior
- 12 Linguistics and animal communication
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Contents of Volumes I, II, and IV
Summary
Introduction
The present chapter is a selected overview of the issues concerning language perception that have been most heavily debated during the last ten years and are still very much current at the time of writing.
It is not easy to design the structure and scope of a chapter on language perception. Depending on the area of research and on the interest of the researcher, the term ‘perception’ has been synonymous with identificationy recognition, discrimination, understanding, and comprehension. In speech perception research, the term covers almost every sensory and perceptual operation, in psycholinguistics the term has been used to designate such diverse processes as word recognition, the segmentation of the speech signal, judgements of similarity between two linguistic structures, and even the comprehension of connected discourse.
It is also impossible to define a sharp boundary between language perception and language comprehension. As Fodor asks, ‘Where does sentence recognition stop and more central activities take over?’ (1983:61). In vision, we recognize a world of objects, people, faces; we do not ‘perceive’ corners, shadows, and edges. When dealing with speech, we perceive words and sentences, not just sequences of sounds. Perceiving language means carrying out various psychological operations such as isolating and segmenting words, phrases, and longer units, and attributing meaning to them. Listening to an unknown language and to a familiar one involves perception in both cases. However, the experience of being exposed to an unknown foreign language is completely different from that of listening to our native language, or to one which bears structural similarities to languages we know.
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- Information
- Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey , pp. 97 - 123Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988
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