Speech perception
![Figure 1: Spectrograms of syllables](/Images/godic/202502/12/Spectrograms_of_syllables_dee_dah_doo0726.png")
![Figure 2: A spectrogram of the phrase](/Images/godic/202502/12/Spectrogram_of_I_owe_you0726.png")
![Figure 3: The left panel shows the 3 peripheral American English vowels /i/, /ɑ/, and /u/ in a standard F1 by F2 plot (in Hz). The mismatch between male, female, and child values is apparent. In the right panel formant distances (in Bark) rather than absolute values are plotted using the normalization procedure proposed by Syrdal and Gopal in 1986.[11] Formant values are taken from Hillenbrand et al. (1995)[8]](/Images/godic/202502/12/Standard_and_normalized_vowel_space20726.png")
![Figure 4: Example identification (red) and discrimination (blue) functions](/Images/godic/202502/12/Categorization-and-discrimination-curves0726.png")
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language. Speech perception research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, in improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners, and in foreign-language teaching.