Exemplar theory

Exemplar models of speech perception differ from the four theories mentioned above which suppose that there is no connection between word- and talker-recognition and that the variation across talkers is ‘noise’ to be filtered out.

The exemplar-based approaches claim listeners store information for word- as well as talker-recognition. According to this theory, particular instances of speech sounds are stored in the memory of a listener. In the process of speech perception, the remembered instances of e.g. a syllable stored in the listener’s memory are compared with the incoming stimulus so that the stimulus can be categorized. Similarly, when recognizing a talker, all the memory traces of utterances produced by that talker are activated and the talker’s identity is determined. Supporting this theory are several experiments reported by Johnson that suggest that our signal identification is more accurate when we are familiar with the talker or when we have visual representation of the talker’s gender. When the talker is unpredictable or the sex misidentified, the error rate in word-identification is much higher.

The exemplar models have to face several objections, two of which are (1) insufficient memory capacity to store every utterance ever heard and, concerning the ability to produce what was heard, (2) whether also the talker’s own articulatory gestures are stored or computed when producing utterances that would sound as the auditory memories.

Recommended Literature on the topic:

Соколова М.А., К.П. Гинтовт, И.С. Тихонова, Р.М. Тихонова. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка. – М.: Владос, 1996. – 285 с.; Соколова М.А., К.П. Гинтовт, Л.А. Кантер и др. Практическая фонетика английского языка. – М.: Владос, 1997. – 384 с.; Leonteva S.F. A Theoretical Course of English Phonetics. – M.: Vyshaya Shkola, 1980. – 271 p.; Babiychuk L.V., Bekhta I.A. Lecture Notes on the English Phonetics. – Lviv: Aral, 2008. – 106 p. Pike, Kenneth L. (1943). Phonetics: A critical analysis of phonetic theory and a technic for the practical description of sounds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Ladefoged, Peter (1996). Elements of Acoustic Phonetics (2nd ed.). The University of Chicago Press, Ltd. London; Stevens, Kenneth (2000). Acoustic Phonetics (Current Studies in Linguistics). The MIT Press, New Ed edition;

Fant, Gunnar. (1960). Acoustic theory of speech production, with calculations based on X-ray studies of Russian articulations. Description and analysis of contemporary standard Russian (No. 2). Gravenhage: Mouton. (2nd ed. published in 1970); Jakobson, Roman; Fant, Gunnar; & Halle, Morris. (1952). Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. MIT acoustics laboratory technical report (No. 13). Cambridge, MA: MIT.; Johnson, Keith. (2003). Acoustic and auditory phonetics (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.; Liberman, A.M. (1957). "Some results of research on speech perception". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 29(1): 117–123.; Warren, R.M. (1970). "Restoration of missing speech sounds". Science 167: 392–393.; Garnes, S., Bond, Z.S. (1976). "The relationship between acoustic information and semantic expectation". Phonologica 1976: 285-293.; Massaro, D.W. (1989). "Testing between the TRACE Model and the Fuzzy Logical Model of Speech perception". Cognitive Psychology 21: 398–421.