THE SPEECH COMMUNICATION PROCESS AND THEIR CRITICAL COMPONENT

Speech processing by human listeners extracts meaning from acoustic input through intermediate steps involving abstract representations of what was heard.The latest results from several lines of research are brought together here to shed light on the nature and role of these beliefs.In speech recognition, the representations of phonological form and conceptual content are dissociated. This follows from the independence of priming patterns for word form and meaning. The nature of phonological representations is determined not only by the acoustic-phonetic input, but also by other sources of information,including metalanguage knowledge. This follows from the evidence that listeners can store the two forms as different, without showing any evidence that they can detect the difference in the question when they listen to the speech. Lexical representations,in turn, are separated from prelexic representations, which are also abstract in nature. This follows from evidence that perceptual learning about the  implementation of a particular speaker's phoneme, induced on the basis of several words, is generalized throughout the lexicon to inform the recognition of all words containing the same phoneme. The efficiency of human speech processing isbased on the rapid execution of operations on abstract representations