Towards a New Framework

Abstract

The discussion of the last three chapters has been conducted on a fairly philosophical plane, as I have uncovered the understanding of Subject and World which supports cognitivist philosophy and thus the IP theory of human speech perception, and presented reasons to suggest that this understanding is not the most appropriate in the context. It remains then to relate this discussion to the specific domain of human speech perception research and theory; and it is the purpose of this final chapter to make that relationship. The chapter has two main aims. The first is to present a brief analysis of the IP model of speech perception in terms of the philosophical position outlined in Chapter 4. This will allow me to highlight what I see as ill-formulation of the questions IP seeks to answer, and to show how these and other problems with IP can be traced to certain incoherences in its basic assumptions about the nature of the Subject and the World. The second aim is to present a preliminary outline of an alternative framework within which available knowledge about human speech perception can be interpreted, and according to which further speech perception research might be conducted. This approach takes as its starting point a quite different understanding of the Subject and World to that of IP.