speech perception

Why are other people’s phone conversations so annoying? A new study suggests that hearing only half a conversation is more distracting than other kinds of conversations because we're missing the other side of the story and so can't predict the flow of the conversation. This finding suggests that driving a car might be impaired not only by the driver talking on the phone, but also by passengers talking on their phones.

As I get older, the question of how we perceive speech becomes more interesting (people don’t talk as clearly as they used to!). So I was intrigued by this latest research that reveals that it is not so much a question of whether consonants or vowels are more important (although consonants do appear to be less important than vowels — the opposite of what is true for written language), but a matter of transitions.