Ecological approaches to speech perception

A literature review demonstrates that very general scientific presuppositions which Whitehead regarded as instances of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and Bohm labelled 'fragmentation' characterise current research in speech perception. It is then argued that the following two hypotheses allow these presuppositions to be tested 1 For every exclusively auditory experiment in speech perception, an attempted replication to the audio-visual case can be conducted which will result in a failure to replicate. 2 If an effect that is obtained through dubbing can also be produced with at least contrinsically related optical and acoustic signals, an experiment can be conducted which will result in a failure to replicate from dubbing to the more naturalistic case. A series of twelve experiments provides strong evidence to support both of the hypotheses. This is taken to establish that future speech research must orientate itself relative to naturalistic speech perception and not the dimensions of Physics. Some implications of this reorientation are discussed