Is speech perception modular or interactive?

Abstract

Norris et al. recently reported experimental evidence that listeners learn phoneme categories in response to lexical feedback. To reconcile these findings with their modular account of speech perception, the authors argue that top-down feedback can be used to support phoneme learning, but not to influence on-line phonemic processing. We suggest that these findings have broader implications than the authors assume, and we discuss potential challenges for integrating a modular theory with top-down learning.