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Psychology >> Psychology Terms >> Categorical Perception

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Categorical Perception

In the context of speech perception, categorical perception is the tendency to hear speech sounds 'merely' as members of a category - the category of 'z' sounds, or the category of 'p' sounds, and so on.

As a consequence, one tends to hear sounds within the category as being rather similar to each other. Sounds from different categories, however, are perceived quite different.

Large portions of the VOT continuum correspond to single speech tokens in the ears of the participant. Rather than gradually being less willing to call a speech token /b/, there is a sharp boundary in the identification function.
This supports the claim that speech perception is categorical and not continuous.

This categorical boundary isn't merely a case of participants categorizing audibly different speech tokens as being members of the same category.

People are good at discriminating between tokens if they fall on opposite sides of the identification function boundary, but they are quite poor at discriminating between speech tokens if they both fall on the same side of the boundary.