This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This course will examine the human ability to receive and process spoken signals. It will start with introducing the foundations of human audition, the hearing mechanism and its properties in healthy and clinical populations. Ways of measuring perceptual impressions (auditory scales) and multimodality of speech perception will be discussed, along with models of speech perception. Students will be introduced to the key issues in speech perception research, including perception of different linguistic units (consonants, vowels, words, prosody) and different accents (regional, social, non-native). The course will cover perceptual illusions where there is a discrepancy between the subjective percept and the objective physical reality, and explain how they arise. Students will have an opportunity to learn how perceptual research is conducted by using the relevant specialist software (e.g. Praat, DMDX, Psychopy), and hone their IT skills by setting up small-scale perception experiments.
Total Contact Hours: 20
• Online Test (60 minutes, taken outside of class) – 35%
• Take-home Problem Set (equivalent to 2,000 words) – 65%
Indicative Reading List
Johnson, K. (2011). Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jones, M. and Knight, R-A. (2013). Bloomsbury Companion to Phonetics. London: Bloomsbury.
Pisoni, D.B., Remez, R.E. (2005). The Handbook of Speech Perception. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ryalls, J. (1996). A Basic Introduction to Speech Perception. San Diego: Cengage Publishing.
Warren, R. (2007). Auditory Perception. Cambridge: CUP.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
8.1 Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of anatomical and physiological bases of human speech perception;
8.2 Show familiarity with different auditory scales to measure perceptual abilities in healthy and clinical populations;
8.3 Deploy analytical skills to the interpretation of perceptual data, and demonstrate solid understanding of key issues and methodological debates in speech perception research;
8.4 Appreciate the gap between acoustic speech signals and their auditory perception and show awareness of the constructive processes underpinning human speech perception;
8.5 Show practical skills in conducting perception research by using relevant software.
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