Linguistic categories and speech perception

Islands of acoustic/auditory reliability
• Some acoustic-phonetic features are more robust
across contexts and speakers than others.
Of these:
– All are defined or definable in relational terms.
– Some are static e.g. vowels with two formants
close together in frequency
(“landmarks” in Hz
Quantal Theory)
– Some are dynamic (e.g. consonantal gestures)
time