Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

Get access

Categorical Perception
(3,138 words)

The acoustic realization of consonants and vowels in a language is highly variable depending on the speaker, the phonological context, and the speaking rate. Categorical Perception (CP) is a mechanism to explain how the speech signal with infinite variability is perceptually mapped onto a finite set of discrete linguistic symbols. Although the initial studies only tested English materials and the research field is dominated by English-based studies, CP is considered to be a universal feature of …

Cite this page
Yang ZHANG, “Categorical Perception”, in: Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, General Editor Rint Sybesma. Consulted online on 26 March 2023 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2210-7363_ecll_COM_000071>
First published online: 2015



▲   Back to top   ▲