Psychology Commons^™

Lexical Influence In Phoneme Perception With Non-Degraded And Spectrally-Degraded Speech, Jane Bradley Smart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In speech perception tasks with ambiguous bottom-up information, lexical processes have been shown to influence listener responses, such as in phoneme categorization tasks (Ganong, 1980). Proponents of interactive theories of speech perception and spoken word recognition assert this influence is a top-down feedback mechanism that can affect bottom-up perceptual processes (e.g., McClelland & Elman, 1986). While robust influences on phoneme perception have been reported in multiple studies (Connine & Clifton, 1987; Ganong, 1980; Gow, Segawa, Ahlfors, & Lin, 2008; Pitt & Samuel, 1993; among others), some phonetic contrasts, particularly those that distinguish place of articulation, have been tested in very …