Bringing back the voice: on the auditory objects of speech perception

Abstract

When you hear a person speaking in a familiar language you perceive the speech sounds uttered and the voice that produces them. How are speech sounds and voice related in a typical auditory experience of hearing speech in a particular voice? And how to conceive of the objects of such experiences? I propose a conception of auditory objects of speech perception as temporally structured mereologically complex individuals. A common experience is that speech sounds and the voice that produces them appear united. I argue that the metaphysical underpinnings of the experienced unity of speech sounds and voices can be explained in terms of the mereological view on sounds and their sources. I also propose a psychological explanation (the Voice Shaping Speech model) of how we form and individuate the auditory objects of experiences of listening to speech in a particular voice. Voice characteristics enable determining the identity of auditory objects of speech sound perception by making some features of the speech signal stable and predictable.

Experiences of linguistic understanding as epistemic feelings

“…Instead of fixating on the analogy between perception and linguistic understanding, we have good grounds to suppose that at the psychological level some of the underlying processes necessary for understanding an utterance are purely perceptual (speech signal processing), whereas other seem to be cognitive (processing of a meaning communicated with an utterance). Linguistic comprehension relies on several processing stages and encompasses both perceptual elements (the recognition of speech sounds, speaker's voice, tone and accent, O'Callaghan, 2011, 2015; Drożdżowicz, 2020) and elements that are characteristic for grasping or understanding meaning (e.g., Dodd, 2014). However, that some of the initial processes responsible for speech sound perception that underlie linguistic comprehension are perceptual and may thus result in some perceptual experiences, does not imply that the experience we typically have when we come to understand an utterance is perceptual.…”