Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Anna Watts Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford, OX2 6GG, United Kingdom.
Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road, OX1 3QG, Oxford, United Kingdom.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 Aug;146(2):937. doi: 10.1121/1.5119126.
This historical paper examines a pioneering theory of speech production and perception from the thirteenth century. Robert Grosseteste (c.1175—1253) was a celebrated medieval thinker, who developed an impressive corpus of treatises on the natural world. This paper looks at his treatise on sound and phonetics, []. Through interdisciplinary analysis of the text, this paper finds a theory of vowel production and perception that is notably mathematical, with a formulation of vowel space rooted in combinatorics. Specifically, Grosseteste constructs a categorical space comprising three fundamental types of movements pertaining to the vocal apparatus: linear, circular, and dilational-constrictional; these correspond to similarity transformations of translation, rotation, and uniform scaling, respectively. That Grosseteste's space is categorical, and low-dimensional, is remarkable vis-a-vis current theories of phoneme perception. As well as his description of vowel space, Grosseteste also sets out a hypothetical framework of multisensory integration, uniting the production, perception, and representation in writing of vowels with a set of geometric figures associated with “mental images.” This has clear resonances with contemporary studies of motor facilitation during speech perception and audiovisual speech. This paper additionally provides an experimental foray, illustrating the coherence of mathematical and scientific thinking underpinning this early theory.
这篇历史论文考察了 13 世纪一个开创性的言语产生和感知理论。罗伯特·格罗斯泰斯特（Robert Grosseteste，约 1175—1253 年）是一位著名的中世纪思想家，他撰写了大量关于自然世界的论文。本文研究了他关于声音和语音学的论文[]. 通过对文本的跨学科分析，本文发现了一种具有显著数学性的元音产生和感知理论，其元音空间的表述源于组合学。具体来说，格罗斯泰斯特构建了一个包含三个基本类型运动的范畴空间，这些运动与发声器官有关：线性、圆形和扩张-收缩；它们分别对应于平移、旋转和均匀缩放的相似变换。格罗斯泰斯特的空间是范畴性的和低维的，这在当前的音位感知理论中是非常显著的。除了他对元音空间的描述，格罗斯泰斯特还提出了一个多感觉整合的假设框架，将元音的产生、感知和在写作中的表示与一组与“心理图像”相关的几何图形结合起来。这与当代言语感知和视听言语中的运动促进研究有明显的共鸣。本文还提供了一个实验性的尝试，说明了这种早期理论所基于的数学和科学思维的一致性。
