Auditory phonetics investigates how listeners hear and interpret the physical sounds of speech. The input is an acoustic signal, but the outcome is a perceptual response: identifying a sound, discriminating two recordings or judging their similarity. It connects acoustic phonetics to hearing and to learned phonetic categories.
A simple controlled listening experiment presents pairs of recorded sounds in a randomized order and asks whether they differ. A separate identification task asks which category each recording belongs to. The tasks answer different questions: a listener can detect a physical difference without assigning the recordings to different phonemes. Praat supports forced-choice listening tasks, including same–different and AXB discrimination designs.[ref]
Listening Experiments in the Praat Manual by Paul Boersma. ExperimentMFC, sections 2.5 and 3.1–3.2: randomization strategies, simple discrimination and AXB designs
The sound history presented to a listener can also matter. In Jessica Maye's infant study with collaborators, different exposure distributions along a speech-sound continuum produced different later discrimination patterns. The result concerns the tested exposure and task, rather than a complete account of how a language's sound system develops.[ref]
Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination by Jessica Maye and others. 2002, abstract and the comparison of unimodal and bimodal exposure distributions
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