The process of speech perception is analyzed into three main operations: (1) translation of the speech signal into form suitable for the nervous system, (2) identification of discrete speech elements, and (3) comprehension of meaning. The first operation appears to correspond roughly to the transformation made by the sound spectrograph. The second may be carried out by the neural equivalent of a set of matched filters. The third appears to involve a neural form of cross‐correlation that exhibits some of the properties of the analogous electronic process.