Speech Perception Problems of Japanese Students

Auditory phonetics studies the perceptual response to speech sounds, as mediated by ear, auditory nerve, and brain (Cfr Robins, 1980; Gimson, 1989). According to E.B. Titchener and W. Wundt, perception is the result of learning added to raw sensations. Gestalt psychology sees perception as the result from an innate organizing process. The transactional approach states that perception is based on assumptions about the construction of reality.

To be able to dichotomize between developmental and pathological problems of auditory perception, one has first to understand the mechanisms of perception. Speech perception seems to be idiosyncratic, a unique independent subsystem of the auditory system. The vocal organs evolved to allow speech production; the speech perception organs evolved to receive speech. Sounds are heard as speech or no-speech. This is the conception currently in vogue in the little understood speech perception field.

Two theories of speech perception have been proposed. Active Listening asserts that listeners are active actors in speech perception, i.e. they decode sounds with reference to how they would be produced in speech. In this perspective, the motor theory (1960s) argues that people internally model the articulatory movements of a speaker. They identify sounds by sensing the articulatory gestures that are perceived as having produced them. In ana

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ices for assessment. Many bright students fail school because of unrecognized perceptual dysfunctions (such as dyslexia). Understanding spoken language Not all problems of speech perception are auditory. However, "understanding spoken language is essentially an inferential process based on a perception of cues rather than straightforward matching of sound to meaning" (Rost, 1990, p. 33). Carroll (1977, pp. 496-512) identified a number of cognitive and affective variables affecting listening comprehension, including the listener's motivation, ability to perceive relations among elements of the discourse, and ability to focus attention. Therefore, before blaming auditory perception as the physical factor hindering comprehension, the teacher should look at attitudinal and other psychological variables which are quite common in the classroom population. Note, by the way, that there is no consensus on what the process of listening entails. Witkin (1990) remarked that some researchers use the term on a highly abstract level; others, on the level of physiological or neurological processes. Glen (1989) analyzed some 50 definitions of listening, and concurred that there is no universally accepted definition of the construct of even native
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Approximate Word count = 1724
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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