When the Objects of Perception Are Spoken

An analysis of the auditory enhancement theory of speech perception reveals its liabilities despite its plausibility. Four points are featured in a critique of its main premise: that the objects of speech perception are sounds, and, therefore, the perception of speech relies primarily on the categorization of auditory qualities. First, this critique notes that auditory enhancement theory is conventional, despite professed differences from the accounts which it disputes, in adopting consonant and vowel inventories as the objects of perception. Second, the critique argues that auditory enhancement theory fails three empirical tests of this equa- tion of phonetic attributes and auditory qualities. Third, the critique alleges that the auditory enhancement theory seeks support from equivocal experiments on animal training, in which the limited similarity of human and nonhuman test performance remains unexplored empirically and unexplained. Last, the critique concludes that the theory of speech perception by auditory enhancement relies on parsimony and distinctiveness as organizing principles for phonetic sound pat- terns, both of which are clearly inconsistent with central findings of linguistic and psychological research on speech perception and production.