The relation between language users' perception and production repertoires

Understanding the relation between perceived and produced speech for individual language users is important for theories of speech perception and production, and for theories of the phonetic bases of sound change. The research program described in this paper is guided by the hypothesis that a language user's perception and production repertoires are complexly related in ways mediated by wide-ranging (phonetic, phonological, sociocognitive, other) factors. One aim of this program is to test the long-standing assumption, particularly in the sound change literature, that the phonetic variants that a language user finds especially salient or useful in perception are manifested in that individual's productions. Experimental findings from studies of both stable patterns of coarticulatory variation and sound change in progress are reported that provide some support for this assumption. However, aspects of this work remain in the early stages; ongoing work more systematically explores the interacting factors that influence the productionperception relation.