section_path: Perception
section_name: Perception
paragraph_text: Perception
  
  Speech perception refers to the processes by which humans can interpret and understand the sounds used in language. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language. Research into speech perception also has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, as well as improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners.
  
  Speech perception is categorical, in that people put the sounds they hear into categories rather than perceiving them as a spectrum. People are more likely to be able to hear differences in sounds across categorical boundaries than within them. A good example of this is voice onset time (VOT), one aspect of the phonetic production of consonant sounds. For example, Hebrew speakers, who distinguish voiced /b/ from voiceless /p/, will more easily detect a change in VOT from -10 (perceived as /b/) to 0 (perceived as /p/) than a change in VOT from +10 to +20, or -10 to -20, despite this being an equally large change on the VOT spectrum.