The Development of Speech Perception: The Transition from Speech Sounds to Spoken Words (Language, Speech, and Communication) - Hardcover

This comprehensive collection of current research in the development of speech perception and perceptual learning documents the striking changes that take place both in early childhood and throughout life and speculates about the mechanisms responsible for those changes. The findings reported from this rich and active field address the role of growing linguistic knowledge and experience and demonstrate that speech perception develops in a bidirectional interplay with several levels of linguistic structure and cognitive processes. Examining transitions in the perceptual processing of speech from infancy to adulthood as well as what causes these transitions, the contributors take up a broad range of issues that are central to constructing a theory of speech perception and to understanding the development of this ability. These include the nature of infants' early sensory proficiencies, how these skills come to support the recognition of linguistic units, developmental differences in the representation and processing of linguistic units, the acquisition of early word patterns and a phonological system, and the mechanisms behind perceptual learning. The Development of Speech Perception is unique in attempting to integrate research involving infants, young children, and adults and in its thorough treatment of developmental issues in speech perception. It systematically explores how adult perceptual abilities begin to develop from early infant capabilities, and in doing so addresses several levels of linguistic processing.

Development and Evolution surveys and illuminates the key themes of rapidly changing fields and areas of controversy that are redefining the theory and philosophy of biology. It continues Stanley Salthe's investigation of evolutionary theory, begun in his influential book Evolving Hierarchical Systems, while negating the implicit philosophical mechanisms of much of that work. Here Salthe attempts to reinitiate a theory of biology from the perspective of development rather than from that of evolution, recognizing the applicability of general systems thinking to biological and social phenomena and pointing toward a non-Darwinian and even a postmodern biology.Salthe's intent is nothing less than to provide, with this alternative paradigm, a position from which the deconstruction of the Bacononian/Cartesian/Newtonian/Darwinian/Comptian tradition becomes possible, while at the same time suggesting in its place an organic view predicated upon Aristotelian and Hegelian antecedents. In the face of complexity, we must alter our view of the universe as inherently ordered and predictable; order develops, but at great cost.Explorating of the nature of change in a complex world, Salthe brings together such disparate areas as hierarchy theory, information theory, and semiotics in illuminating ways as he seeks a mode of answering questions as to the nature of complexity and as to how we might derive information from the interactions of the parts of a contextualized developing system. Stanley N. Salthe, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is a Visiting Scientist in Biological Sciences at Binghamton University.