ReviewThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America2022
The myth of categorical perception.
Review in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Structural connectivity of auditory-linguistic brain networks predicts success in speech categorization and listening in noise.Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Voice perception reflects graded sensitivity to acoustic cues along the auditory hierarchy.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- Article
- Speech Categorization Consistency Predicts Language and Reading Abilities in Korean School-Age Children.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Phonetic variability leads to gradient speech perception.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2026Article
- Measuring age-related differences in phonetic gradiency with the visual analogue scale and eye tracking.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2026Article
- Linguistic pitch is hierarchically encoded in the right ventral stream.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Quantifying the visual salience of Swedish vowel contrasts: a computer vision approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Longitudinal Changes in the Structure of Speech Categorization Across School Age Years: Children Become More Gradient and More Consistent.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Consistency in phonetic categorization predicts successful speech-in-noise perception.JASA express letters · 2025Article
- Article
- The consistency of categorization-consistency in speech perception.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Testing Principles of Choice in Categorization.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Expectation-driven sensory adaptations support enhanced acuity during categorical perception.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Timecourse of bottom-up and top-down language processing during a picture-based semantic priming task.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2025Article
- Reevaluating the classification of pediatric speech sound disorders: a ground truthing perspective.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Functional benefits of continuous vs. categorical listening strategies on the neural encoding and perception of noise-degraded speech.Brain research · 2024Article
- Linguistic diversity shapes flexible speech perception in school age children.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Is working memory domain-general or domain-specific?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- The Mason-Alberta Phonetic Segmenter: a forced alignment system based on deep neural networks and interpolation.Phonetica · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
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Abstract
Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is widely known to be an artifact of task demands. CP is empirically defined as a relationship between phoneme identification and discrimination. As discrimination tasks do not appear to require categorization, this was thought to support the claim that listeners perceive speech solely in terms of linguistic categories. However, 50 years of work using discrimination tasks, priming, the visual world paradigm, and event related potentials has rejected the strongest forms of CP and provided little strong evidence for any form of it. This paper reviews the origins and impact of this scientific meme and the work challenging it. It discusses work showing that the encoding of auditory input is largely continuous, not categorical, and describes the modern theoretical synthesis in which listeners preserve fine-grained detail to enable more flexible processing. This synthesis is fundamentally inconsistent with CP. This leads to a different understanding of how to use and interpret the most basic paradigms in speech perception-phoneme identification along a continuum-and has implications for understanding language and hearing disorders, development, and multilingualism.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.