The observation that we can understand the speech of different speakers, regardless of variations in the pitches of the speakers' voices, the speakers' rates of speech, and the speakers' dialects, indicates that
A)the prosodic components of speech have little functional significance in speech comprehension.
B)the recognition of spoken words depends on orthography rather than other aspects of language.
C)speech comprehension involves semantic analysis of words rather than phonological analysis of words.
D)speech recognition cannot rely on the direct matching of specific sounds to language representations in memory.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The observation that variations in pitch, rate, and dialect do not impede speech comprehension suggests that speech recognition cannot rely on an exact match of specific sounds to language representations in memory. Instead, it relies on the extraction of more abstract, invariant features from the speech signal that can be mapped onto words and meanings. This suggests that speech recognition involves more complex phonological, semantic, and contextual analysis than a simple direct matching process.

The Observation That We Can Understand the Speech of Different