Listeners categorize the same speech sound differently depending on the information sought

Evidence

In auditory categorization, sounds are classified based on their acoustic features or more processed forms of information (e.g., semantic knowledge), providing an efficient means to interact with stimuli in our environment (Ashby and Berretty 1997 ; Gifford et al. 2014 ). For example, when we hear the word “Groningen” from different speakers, we can categorize the gender of each speaker based on the pitch of the speaker’s voice. On the other hand, to analyze the linguistic content transmitted by a speech sound, we can ignore the unique pitch, timbre etc. of each speaker and categorize the sound into the distinct word category “Groningen”. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4878

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates auditory categorization with the speaker-gender vs word-content example.