Robust speech perception: Recognize the familiar, generalize to the similar, and adapt to the novel.

Successful speech perception requires that listeners map the acoustic signal to linguistic categories. These mappings are not only probabilistic, but change depending on the situation. For example, one talker's /p/ might be physically indistinguishable from another talker's /b/ (cf. lack of invariance). We characterize the computational problem posed by such a subjectively nonstationary world and propose that the speech perception system...