Perception in psychology: Perception can be defined as our recognition and interpretation of sensory information. Perception also includes how we respond to the information. We can think of perception as a process where we take in sensory information from our environment and use that information in order to interact with our environment. Perception allows us to take the sensory information in and make it into something meaningful.

Perception in Design: A characteristic of the dimension that allows to play with the shapes, colors, typography, visual organizations, images, and light to create different experiences about the same object.

Perception (Belief): A belief or opinion, often held by many people and based on how things seem.

Perception (Sight): The quality of being aware of things through the physical senses,especially sight.

Perception (Awareness): An awareness of things through the physical senses, esp. sight.

Language perception: Language perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language. Speech perception research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, in improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners, and in foreign-language teaching.

Infant language perception: Infants begin the process of language acquisition by being able to detect very small differences between speech sounds. They can discriminate all possible speech contrasts (phonemes). Gradually, as they are exposed to their native language, their perception becomes language-specific, i.e. they learn how to ignore the differences within phonemic categories of the language (differences that may well be contrastive in other languages – for example, English distinguishes two voicing categories of plosives, whereas Thai has three categories; infants must learn which differences are distinctive in their native language uses, and which are not). As infants learn how to sort incoming speech sounds into categories, ignoring irrelevant differences and reinforcing the contrastive ones, their perception becomes categorical. Infants learn to contrast different vowel phonemes of their native language by approximately 6 months of age. The native consonantal contrasts are acquired by 11 or 12 months of age.^[29] Some researchers have proposed that infants may be able to learn the sound categories of their native language through passive listening, using a process called statistical learning. Others even claim that certain sound categories are innate, that is, they are genetically specified. If day-old babies are presented with their mother’s voice speaking normally, abnormally (in monotone), and a stranger’s voice, they react only to their mother’s voice speaking normally. When a human and a non-human sound is played, babies turn their head only to the source of human sound. It has been suggested that auditory learning begins already in the pre-natal period.

Different approaches.

Cohort Model:

Proposed in the 1980’s by Marslen-Wilson, the Cohort-Model is a representation for lexical retrieval. An individual’s lexicon is his or her mental dictionary or vocabulary of all the words he or she is familiar with. According to a study, the average individual has a lexicon of about 45,000 to 60,000 words. The premise of the Cohort Model is that a listener maps novel auditory information onto words that already exist in his or her lexicon to interpret the new word. Each part of an auditory utterance can be broken down into segments. The listener pays attention to the individual segments and maps these onto pre-existing words in their lexicon. As more and more segments of the utterance are perceived by the listener, he or she can omit words from their lexicon that do not follow the same pattern.

TRACE Model:

           TRACE model for speech perception was one of the first models developed for perceiving speech, and is one of the better known models. TRACE Model is a framework in which the primary function is to take all of the various sources of information found in speech and integrate them to identify single words. The TRACE model, founded by McClelland and Elman (1986) is based on the principles of interactive activation. All components of speech (features, phonemes, and words) have their own role in creating intelligible speech, and using TRACE to unite those leads to a complete stream of speech, instead of individual components. The TRACE model is broken into two distinct components. TRACE I deals mainly with short segments of real speech, whereas TRACE II deals with identification of phonemes and words in speech. The model as a whole, consists of a very large number of units which are organized into three separate levels. Each level is comprised of a bank of detectors for distinguishing the components of that level.