PERCEPTION
The next stage is perception. Once the sound wave has been converted into signals in the nervous system, the brain must begin to extract the relevant information for understanding the message. Here are some of the things that must be done at this stage:
| It seems a very obvious point, but it’s important. The brain must recognize that the sounds it is receiving are speech sounds. Speech is processed differently from music, environmental noise or animal calls. |
| The brain must also detect if the sounds belong to a language that the hearer can understand. |
| The brain detects whether the speaker is female or male, adult or child. |
| After this, the brain goes through the process of normalization, which allows it to ignore the individual acoustic characteristics of the speaker. |