linguistics known as phonology would have a profound influence on the problem of.
perceptual invariance as it applies to speech perception. Saussure`s initiation of the.
Structuralist movement in linguistics and the innovative phonology of Bloomfield could.
be cited as perhaps the most important prerequisites to the of phonology of the Prague.
School in which Trubetskoy (1939) and Jakobson (1962) established and refined the.
theoretical concept of the phoneme. It was the primary unit of speech, originally.
considered to be an abstract unit with contrastive (distinctive function). Jakobson, Fant.
and Halle (1952) attempted to define the phoneme in concrete phonetic terms and their.
work contributed to the theoretical paradigm of categorical perception used extensively in.
psychology and linguistics.
The theoretical idea of the phoneme and the phoneme inventory as part of the linguistic.
knowledge of the native speaker of human language fit well with associative theory as the.
prime solution to the problem of perceptual invariance as it applied to the perception of.
human speech. Each phoneme was ideally associated with a set of acoustic cues which.
were used by the listener to identify the phonemes in an incoming utterance. Variation in.
the acoustic identity of a given phoneme was tolerated by the listener as long as the.
category boundaries were not infringed upon. The category boundaries for acoustic.
variation were extensively tested with speech synthesis. Figure 2 is an example of this.
type of test.
fig 2 about here.
figure caption.
Figure 2: Results of a vowel identification test. The y-axis represents per cent of the.
Swedish long vowelo:/ responses. The x-axis represents the array of stimuli in a.
stepwise second formant transition froma:/ too:/ quality. Each data point is a mean of.
20 listener responses. (McAllister, 1995).
Systematic step-wise variation of the second formant frequency gave a gradual vowel.
quality transition between the Swedish long vowels/ and/ in -tag- (take) and- tåg-.