Introduction
The present chapter is a selected overview of the issues concerning language perception that have been most heavily debated during the last ten years and are still very much current at the time of writing.
It is not easy to design the structure and scope of a chapter on language perception. Depending on the area of research and on the interest of the researcher, the term ‘perception’ has been synonymous with identificationy recognition, discrimination, understanding, and comprehension. In speech perception research, the term covers almost every sensory and perceptual operation, in psycholinguistics the term has been used to designate such diverse processes as word recognition, the segmentation of the speech signal, judgements of similarity between two linguistic structures, and even the comprehension of connected discourse.
It is also impossible to define a sharp boundary between language perception and language comprehension. As Fodor asks, ‘Where does sentence recognition stop and more central activities take over?’ (1983:61). In vision, we recognize a world of objects, people, faces; we do not ‘perceive’ corners, shadows, and edges. When dealing with speech, we perceive words and sentences, not just sequences of sounds. Perceiving language means carrying out various psychological operations such as isolating and segmenting words, phrases, and longer units, and attributing meaning to them. Listening to an unknown language and to a familiar one involves perception in both cases. However, the experience of being exposed to an unknown foreign language is completely different from that of listening to our native language, or to one which bears structural similarities to languages we know.