Tyler Perrachione

A theory of speech perception that maps between auditory input and articulatory features was most famously proposed by Liberman et al. (1967). Their theory was later revised by the same authors (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985) to account for new discoveries in comparative evolutionary biology and developmental psychology. Although not the first to propose that gestural features were the fundamental unit of the speech code, their " motor theory of speech perception " has become one of the most cited (though perhaps predominately as a counterexample to an auditory explanation). Other theories are very similar in their approach, though they go by different names, such as Carol Fowler's " direct realism " (see Diehl, Lotto, & Holt, 2004, for a review of various theories of speech perception). The " motor theory of speech perception " (or, hereafter, sensorimotor theory) makes two specific and empirically testable predictions about the nature of spoken language processing. First, the fundamental units of spoken language are shared between speech production and perception; and, second, these underlying units consist of the articulatory features involved in producing speech. Why is your topic interesting? What is its significance to speech and hearing? Such a sensorimotor theory is attractive for at least two reasons, which appear largely unaddressed in other, auditory-only theories: First, it explains how highly variable acoustic signals give rise to invariant phonemic percepts. Second, it provides a parsimonious way to link the elements of spoken language production and perception into a single system. Sensorimotor theories of speech perception are an extremely interesting an open avenue of research. There has not been a great deal of empirical work aimed at testing their specific predictions, leaving room