Working Models of Human Perception

498 Pages·1989·9.689 MB·English

by  Ben A.G. Elsendoorn (Eds.)

Working Models
of
Human Perception
Edited by
Ben A.G. Elsendoorn & Herman Bouma
Institute for Perception Research - IPO
P.O. Box 513, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
1989
ACADEMIC PRESS
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
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Copyright © 1989, by
ACADEMIC PRESS LIMITED
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by photostat,
microfilm, or any other means, without written permission
from the publisher
ISBN 0-12-238050-9
Printed in Great Britain at the Alden Press, Oxford
Contributors
Stuart M. Anstis Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele
Street, Downsview, Ontario M3J 1P3K, Canada.
Bishnu S. Atal Acoustics Research Department, AT&T Bell Research
Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA.
Tom Bösser Psychologisches Institut, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität,
Schlaunstrasse 2, D-4400 Münster, Federal Republic of Germany.
Frans Boselie Psychologisch Laboratorium, Katholieke Universiteit Nijme-
gen, Postbus 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Don G. Bouwhuis Institute for Perception Research—IPO, P.O. Box 573,
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Bruno G. Breitmeyer Department of Psychology, University of Houston,
Houston, Texas, USA.
Harry C. Bunt Computational Linguistics Unit, Tilburg University, P.O.
Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Anthony Cohen Institute of Phonetics, University of Utrecht, Trans 14,
(Inner city), 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Hendrikus Duifhuis Laboratorium voor Algemene Natuurkunde, Univer-
sity of Groningen, Westersingel 34, 9718 CM Groningen, The Netherlands.
Adrian J. Fourcin Departments of Phonetics and Linguistics, University
College, Wolfson House, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, United
Kingdom.
Julius L. Goldstein The Johns Hopkins University, Biomédical Engineering
Department, Traylor Research Building 533, 720 Rutland Avenue, Balti-
more, MD 21205, USA, and Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Jeroen A.G. Groenendijk ITLI/Department of Philosophy & Department of
Computer Science, Faculty of Arts, University of Amsterdam, Grimburgwal
10, 1012 GA Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Adrian J.M. Houtsma Institute for Perception Research—IPO, P.O. Box
513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
James F. Juola Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Law-
rence, Kansas, USA.
Murât Kunt Laboratoire de Traitement des Signaux, Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne, 16 Chemin de Bellerive, CH-1007 Lausanne, Switzer-
land.
John E. Laird Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan,USA.
Emanuel Leeuwenberg Psychologisch Laboratorium, Katholieke Universi-
teit Nijmegen, Postbus 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Willem J.M. Levelt Max-Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Wundtlaan 1,
6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Björn E.F. Lindblom Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University,
S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden, and University of Texas at Austin, Austin
78712-1196, Texas, USA.
Hans G. Musmann Institut für Theoretische Nachrichtentechnik und Infor-
mationsverarbeitung, Universität von Hannover, Callinstrasse 32, D-3000
Hannover 1, Federal Republic of Germany.
Allen Newell Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon Univer-
sity, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Sieb G. Nooteboom Institute for Perception Research—IPO, P.O. Box 513,
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Present address: Institute of
Phonetics, University of Utrecht, Trans 14, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Nether-
lands.
John J. Ohala Phonology Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
J. Kevin O'Regan Groupe Regard, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimen-
tale, Université René Descartes University, Paris, France.
Paul S. Rosenbloom Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Departments of
Computer Science and Psychology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Califor-
nia, USA. Present address: University of Southern California, Information
Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, California, USA.
Martin J.B. Stokhof ITLI/Department of Philosophy & Department of
Computer Science, Faculty of Arts, University of Amsterdam, Grimburgwal
10, 1012 GA Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Stuart Sutherland Department of Experimental Psychology, Sussex Univer-
sity, Brighton BN1 9QG, United Kingdom.
Martin M. Taylor Defence and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine,
P.O. Box 2000, Downsview, Ontario M3M 3B9, Canada.
Patricia Wright Medical Research Council, Applied Psychology Unit, 15
Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, United Kingdom.
Preface
The workshop * Working Models of Human Perception' has been organized
from 26 - 28 August, 1987, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the
Institute for Perception Research - IPO.
IPO constitutes a research institute in the field of sensory and cogni-
tive information processing by humans, interacting with flexible information
equipment both hardware and software. IPO has been founded and is being
sustained jointly by the Eindhoven University of Technology and Philips
Research Laboratories.
There are a few aspects in which the workshop and, consequently, the
present proceedings are somewhat special:
The area covered is rather wide and deals with a range of human percep-
tual faculties and the corresponding problems in engineering and technology.
It is, of course, good practice to devote workshops to a rather restricted area
of research, such as auditory pitch perception, sentence intonation, visual
psychophysics, image quality, interactive learning, man-computer interfaces,
natural language dialogues, or communication aids for people with percep-
tual handicaps, to mention just a few areas of active research that are of
high interest to IPO and that are partly represented at this workshop. Of
course, we could not hope, and we did not expect to cover each of these
areas in detail in a single workshop. The aim of the present proceedings
was different. By having many areas of perceptual research represented
by renowned experts, we hoped to probe where concepts developed in one
area of human perception research could be generalized to other such areas,
or, more modestly, could be considered as to their usefulness. Perceptual
and cognitive faculties such as: hearing, vision, speech perception, reading,
learning, recollection, computer control and many other human faculties
dealing with information processing, are being performed by a single brain
and it would at least seem possible that some of such faculties have elements
in common. Also, many information processing activities of daily life com-
bine a number of skills that often are so neatly separated in our research,
sometimes even in different disciplines. Therefore, we felt the necessity of
probing for integration from time to time, both from the point of view of
theoretical harmonization and that of trying to understand human infor-
mation processing as it occurs in the real world rather than in our reduced
xii Working models of human perception
research environments. And we thought that working models and explicit,
quantitative theories would constitute a suitable, common vehicle for this
interaction, because the achievements as well as the range of action would be
explicit. Perhaps recent developments in connectionist theory do not quite
fit the scheme, because their basic principles are more transparent than their
outcome, and there is still considerable uncertainty about the limits of ap-
plicability as well.
Also, the present book devotes attention to both theoretical and applied
problems simultaneously. Many applied problems turn out to be very diffi-
cult and they often need deep theoretical insight in order to get solved. In
fact, applied problems often serve as a source of inspiration for theoretical
work, since they usually are beyond reach of present theories and may show
us in what direction theories need to be developed.
As a classic example, we may remind you of the applied problem of ex-
tracting pitch in speech signals, which became apparent in the thirties when
a solution was needed for compressing speech in vocoders for transmission
over transatlantic cables. Only in the last decade or so have we seen the de-
velopment of theories of pitch perception which can deal with the problem.
They also show us how difficult the problem really was. The theory has
been developed on the basis of experiments with analytic laboratory signals
rather than with the complex signals that represent speech. Nevertheless, it
has been demonstrated that the perceptual theory could serve as a basis for
a working model which could handle speech signals quite well. Perhaps it is
only fair to say that the technology of the thirties was equally unsuited for
the construction of such vocoders, had the perceptual theory been known
at the time. In addition, it may be observed that engineering solutions can
sometimes be found without the guidance of deep perceptual theories. But
it is precisely this interweaving of perceptual theory and engineering sciences
which becomes even more pertinent in the areas of endeavour where human
information processing interacts with information processing by machines.
So it would be our view that automatic speech recognition of the future will
combine the best theories of psychoacoustics, the best theoretical insights of
phonetics and the best abilities of signal processing. Similarly, in the long
run, image coding schemes will most probably be based on theories of human
vision. In constructing the man-machine interface for information systems,
it has also become clear that the requirements of the human user both as
to application software and as to the physical man-machine interface have
Preface xiii
to be based on solid insights into the possibilities and restrictions of human
faculties of information processing.
Of course, there is also a type of ad-hoc research that rests on looser
theoretical ground and there is no reason to avoid it if practical problems
are to be solved. In fact, this type of research can also be found in the
solving of theoretical problems, for example by empirical curve fitting or by
the introduction of parameters which allow the description of certain data
without much insight into the type of process behind the data. Empirical
shortcuts of such a nature need not be avoided, but do not offer the prospect
of sight that enables us to understand a wider range of perceptual phenom-
ena as well.
The layout of this book tries to be a reflection of the three main areas of
research at IPO: Hearing and Speech, Vision and Reading, Cognition and
Communication. Following the set-up of the workshop, the organization of
the papers is in pairs, such that the odd-numbered chapters are generally
reactions to the even-numbered chapters. The Overture by Dr Cohen and
the Finale by Dr Levelt are exceptions to this. Dr Levelt's paper can be
considered a bird's eye view of all other contributions. The subject index is
restricted to terminology appearing in chapter and paragraph titles.
Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all those who
have enabled us to organize the present workshop. In its initial stage, it was
the Supervisory Board and the Scientific Board of IPO, who supported the
proposal. Financial support was obtained from a number of organizations.
These were, first of all, both parent organizations of IPO: Philips Research
Laboratories and the Eindhoven University of Technology. We were further
supported by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences KNAW,
by the Ministry of Education, the Netherlands Organization for the Ad-
vancement of Pure Research ZWO (now NWO), and by the Province of
Noord-Brabant. It is very encouraging that the plans for the workshop were
considered with such trust.
It is our hope that this workshop has provided us with new views on
integrating working models of human perception and quantitative theories
which may originate from various diciplines. The present proceedings will
be instrumental in making the insights available for a wide readership.
Perception and Language
Anthony Cohen*
1 Introduction
Being a linguist by training I take this opportunity of the celebration of the
30th anniversary of IPO to try to put into perspective some developments
over the last three decades in the areas of both perception and language
studies. I have come to the conclusion that in studying human perception,
the language we adopt plays an important part and conversely, in studying
language, we should not refrain from considering the role perception assumes
in at least the way we learn to handle speech and language.
When starting work on the perception of speech the assumption was that
much was to be gathered from looking at the characteristics of the ear as
the peripheral sense organ on which acoustic stimuli impinged, constitut-
ing percepts which could be interpreted through apperception into higher
order forms of structured wholes. It was taken for granted that the so-
called sounds of speech served as aggregate wholes for forming meaningful
words which in themselves were the constitutive elements forming sentences.
The approach adopted, trying to establish the acoustic correlates of the
phonemes of speech, was a highly analytical one. There was in other words
a concentration on the auditory modality in terms of current methodology
as used in studies of psychoacoustics, whereas the stimuli chosen were ap-
proximations to speech sounds.
A critical survey of studies in which speech sounds were considered to
be just speechlike samples of complex acoustic stimuli as used in psychoa-
coustics is to be found in Repp (1987).
The upshot of this critique is that such a restricted view, which regards
perception as mere sensory transduction at the exclusion of such factors as
attention and experience falls short in case of speech. In a way this approach
can be valuable to the extent that it provides a lower limit of what the
hearing mechanism can perform under certain laboratory conditions. It is,
however, incapable of extrapolating from its findings how to account for
* Institute of Phonetics, University of Utrecht, Trans 14, (Inner city), 3512 JK Utrecht,
The Netherlands.
WORKING MODELS OF HUMAN PERCEPTION Copyright © 1988 by Academic Press, London
ISBN 0-12-238050-9 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
2 A. Cohen
ordinary perception of ongoing speech. The ultimate aim was to arrive at
the establishment of certain percepts that could be regarded as mediators
for linkage with the phonetic structure of the language at issue. I now agree
with Neisser (1976) that this term is really a metaphor derived from studies
of the visual modality and aimed at capturing the nature of eidetic imagery.
In this view images are not pictures in the head, but plans for obtaining
information from potential environments (Neisser, 1976, p.131). The word
'percept' in itself presupposes a much too static phenomenon that hardly
fits in with the dynamic processes going on in the act of perceiving. In fact,
in ordinary perception, outside the domain of strictly contained laboratory
settings employed in psychophysical experiments, there is a constant match-
ing between objects and events in the external world and our own awareness
of them. In order to find out more about this dynamic process we can resort
to language as a suitable medium in which we can report about it.
We believe that this is a legitimate and fruitful approach in that lan-
guage carries in itself a highly flexible way of expressing how we perceive
the world around us. However, there are pitfalls. In the words of Miller and
Johnson-Laird (1976): ttIf there were some simple relations between syntac-
tic categories and our psychological notions, of course, it would provide a
very convenient shortcut connecting perception and language; our theories
of how language is learned, for example, could be considerably simplified.
Unfortunately, such is not the case" (p.85).
The approach to be adopted will therefore be very similar to that fol-
lowed by Miller and Johnson-Laird in their interesting book of 1976, entitled
'Language and Perception'. There the question is raised how objects and
situations that people talk about should be characterised perceptually. The
answer is not easy to come by: "Psychologists interested in molar descrip-
tions of behaviour generally take the answer as given and speak (with little
comment) about objects, situations, or events to which a behaving organism
responds. Aspects of an organism's environment that are considered relevant
to its behaviour can usually be specified with great precision in centimeters,
grams and seconds, so the experimental situation can be replicated by other
experimenters. But the psychological leap from physical description to sub-
jective experience is usually left to the anthropomorphic imagination of the
reader" (Miller and Johnson-Laird, 1976, p.ll).
I realise that this was written more than ten years ago. In the meantime
we have had what Baars has called the 'cognitive revolution in psychology'.
In the book of that name he reflects the same sentiment as the one just
quoted. In fact he warns against the danger that acommonsense claims about
Perception and language 3
human psychology are supported by numerous unstated presuppositions which
are not made explicit in ordinary speech, because they are tacitly presumed
by everyone" (Baars, 1986, p.82). This way of thinking was of the essence
of the behaviouristic approach. Redemption is held in store, according to
Baars, by artificial intelligence. Up till then, and I quote with approval,
"Psychology has never had a language able to express in a natural way the
facts we observe" (Baars, 1986, p.181). We will certainly return to the
subject of the contribution of A.I. in terms of the computer as a metaphor
of human thinking and more particularly to the claim that it should provide
us with a theoretical language that permits us to be precise about cognitive
issues.
As a starting point we assume that the best way to know about how we
perceive in general is to ask for responses in terms of language. We take
it for granted that human language is the gateway to an understanding of
how the mind works. For a long time the notion of mind has been taboo
in scientific circles concerned with studying human behaviour. It will be
clear from what I mentioned at the beginning of my talk that at IPO we
did not feel constrained by such a taboo. As a matter of fact it has been
our research policy preferably to take highly trained subjects in all our ex-
periments rather than naive ones, since we felt we would stand to gain from
reports by articulate subjects. This was true a fortiori in all areas where
speech or language in general constituted the objects of study.
It would be tempting to give a bird's eye view of the various attempts
undertaken throughout the last 30 years at IPO to portray the methodolog-
ical vicissitudes involved in pinning down the various perceptual faculties
studied here. It would undoubtedly have revealed, in spite of our possibly
idiosyncratic approach, a reflection of the various trends that have been
manifest in studies of this kind over the last 30 years. I would like to men-
tion just in passing the impact of early information theory concepts, in the
hope of measuring in bits the human capacity for taking in information.
The theory itself was developed in a highly technical domain and purported
to establish the size and limitations of signal transmission in a communi-
cation channel. From there it was bodily taken over, or should I say only
metaphorically, to assess the amount of coded information impinging on
a rather passive receiver, acting as a filter. At the time the ideal stimu-
lus material was thought to consist of arbitrary sequences of letters and/or
digits. It turned out that with certain configurations that were known as
meaningful patterns in terms of familiar acronyms, such as PSV, the local