This paper studies speech perception from a cognitive perspective. Context plays an important role in understanding a conversation, thus cognitive contexts are elaborated which includes three parts - forestructure, linguistic context and situational context. The individual ability of language perception depends greatly on the forestructure of his/her own. Linguistic context and situational context provide enough clues of the present conversation for a better understanding. The cognitive processes of speech perception are divided into four steps: sensory mechanisms, recognition, attention, and memory.In the thesis, research methods and cognitive models of processes are also discussed. Top-down theories and bottom-up theories are complementary and both are adopted by researchers. Which theories should be used depends on the specific situation. Interactive Activation Model, often termed as Parallel Distributed Processing (POP) Model or Connectionist Model clearly explains the process of searching for the meaning in the memory. Interactionism and the parallelism are reflected in the searching process.In the last chapter of this thesis, the potential applications of cognitive analysis of speech perception are proposed.