Does Auditory-Motor Learning of Speech Transfer from the CV Syllable to the CVCV Word?

Speech is often described as a sequence of units associating linguistic, sensory and motor representations. Is the connection between these representations preferentially maintained at a specific level in terms of a linguistic unit? In the present study, we contrasted the possibility of a link at the level of the syllable (CV) and the word (CVCV). We modified the production of the syllable /be/ in French speakers using an auditory-motor adaptation paradigm that consists of altering the speakers’ auditory feedback. After stopping the perturbation, we studied to what extent this modification would transfer to the production of the disyllabic word /bebe/ and compared it to the after-effect on /be/. The results show that changes in /be/ transfer partially to /bebe/. The partial influence of the somatosensory and motor representations associated with the syllable on the production of the disyllabic word suggests that both units may contribute to the specification of the motor goals in speech sequences. In addition, the transfer occurs to a larger extent in the first syllable of /bebe/ than in the second one. It raises new questions about a possible interaction between the transfer of auditory-motor learning and serial control processes.