What is the invariance problem?

Abstract: The invariance problem refers to the challenge that listeners face when confronted with acoustic variability in speech sounds as they attempt to map these sounds to few phonological categories.

What is lack of invariance problem linguistics?

Lack of invariance refers to the idea that there is no reliable connection between the language phoneme and its acoustic manifestation in speech. The same word, or even single phoneme, can sound completely differently depending on many factors: 1) Individual differences.

What is categorical perception in language?

“Categorical perception” (CP) corresponds to the extent to which acoustic differences between variants of the same phoneme are less perceptible than differences of the same acoustic magnitude between two different phonemes (Liberman, Harris, Hoffman & Griffith, 1957).

What is perceptual invariance?

Perceptual invariance refers to our ability to recognise object across different contexts. For example, in vision we might recognise a face in different lighting conditions or from different angles, while in hearing this could be a word spoken by different talkers or voice pitches.

What is normalization in speech perception?

“Speaker normalization” refers to this second line of research centering on the fact that phonologically identical utterances show a great deal of acoustic variation across talkers, and that listeners are able to recognize words spoken by different talkers despite this variation.

What is the difference between categorical and continuous perception?

The motor theory of speech perception explained how speech was special and why speech-sounds are perceived categorically: sensory perception is mediated by motor production. Wherever production is categorical, perception will be categorical; where production is continuous, perception will be continuous.

What is Coarticulation linguistics?

Coarticulation refers to changes in speech articulation (acoustic or visual) of the current speech segment (phoneme or viseme) due to neighboring speech. In the visual domain, this phenomenon arises because the visual articulator movements are affected by the neighboring visemes.

What is the acoustic invariance theory?

The theory of relational acoustic invariance claims that there are stable acoustic properties in speech signals that correspond to a phonological feature, and that the perception system utilizes these acoustic properties for stable perception of a phoneme.

What is the Ganong effect?

The “Ganong effect” is the tendency to perceive an ambiguous speech sound as a phoneme that would complete a real word, rather than completing a nonsense/fake word.

What are examples of coarticulation?

Examples of coarticulation are anticipatory velar lowering during a vowel preceding a syllable-final nasal consonant (send) and tongue body raising and fronting during a schwa placed next to the palatoalveolar consonant /ʃ/ (the shore, ashamed).

Is assimilation the same as coarticulation?

Coarticulation in phonetics refers to two different phenomena: the assimilation of the place of articulation of one speech sound to that of an adjacent speech sound.