I’m learning about speech perception in my language science class and my brain cant wrap around the concept of categorical perception in speech. I just need someone to explain it to me in simple terms so I can grasp it. I sorta get it but the big words confuse me. My understanding is basically our brains perceive speech sounds in categories? If it doesn’t fall into a perceived category then we can’t understand it?
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The idea is that our brains perceive very similar sounds of speech as completely distinct, instead of shades of both. It is possible to create a continuum between a clear “pa” sound and a clear “ba” sound, for instance, but if we listen to every sound on the continuum, we experience a point where it switches from sounding like the one to sounding like the other – there’s no point where it sounds like a little of both at the same time. This is categorical perception, and it only happens for speech, not for other sounds.
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