Critique: auditory form and gestural topology in the perception of speech

Some influential accounts of speech perception have asserted that the goal of perception is to recover the articulatory gestures that create the acoustic signal, while others have proposed that speech perception proceeds by a method of acoustic categorization of signal elements. These accounts have been frustrated by difficulties in identifying a set of primitive articulatory constituents underlying speech production, and a set of primitive acoustic-auditory elements underlying speech perception. An argument by Lindblom favors an account of production and perception based on the auditory form of speech and its cognitive elaboration, rejecting the aim of defining a set of articulatory primitives by appealing to theoretical principle, while recognizing the empirical difficulty of identifying a set of acoustic or auditory primitives. An examination of this thesis found opportunities to defend some of its conclusions with independent evidence, but favors a characterization of the constituents of speech perception as linguistic rather than as articulatory or acoustic.