... consists of both successive and concurrent identification on a series of progressively more abstract levels of linguistic structure. In addition to the acoustic analysis of the incoming messages of spoken language, two other sources of information are used to understand speech: "bottom-up" and "top-down". In the former, we receive auditory information, convert it into a neural signal and process the phonetic feature information. In the latter, we use stored information about language and the world to make sense of the speech. Perception occurs when both sources of information interact to make only one alternative plausible to the listener who then perceives a specific message. The smallest unit of sound is the nature of speech sound phonemes. The words in any language are formed by combining these phonemes. English has approximately 40 different phonemes that are defined in terms of what is perceived, rather than in terms of acoustic patterns. Phonemes are ...

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