Motor theory of speech perception

This has increased particularly since the discovery of mirror neurons that link the production and perception of motor movements, including those made by the vocal tract.

[5] The theory was initially proposed in the Haskins Laboratories in the 1950s by Alvin Liberman and Franklin S. Cooper, and developed further by Donald Shankweiler, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Ignatius Mattingly, Carol Fowler and Douglas Whalen.

The hypothesis has its origins in research using pattern playback to create reading machines for the blind that would substitute sounds for orthographic letters.

Initially, the theory was associationist: infants mimic the speech they hear and that this leads to behavioristic associations between articulation and its sensory consequences.

[8] This aspect of the theory was dropped, however, with the discovery that prelinguistic infants could already detect most of the phonetic contrasts used to separate different speech sounds.

[1] The module detected speech in terms of hidden distal objects rather than at the proximal or immediate level of their input.

Likewise, the English consonant /d/ may vary in its acoustic details across different phonetic contexts (the /d/ in /du/ does not technically sound the same as the one in /di/, for example), but all /d/'s as perceived by a listener fall within one category (voiced alveolar plosive) and that is because "linguistic representations are abstract, canonical, phonetic segments or the gestures that underlie these segments.

As three of its advocates have noted, "it has few proponents within the field of speech perception, and many authors cite it primarily to offer critical commentary".[5]p.

[34] However, this only affects the first and already superseded behaviorist version of the theory, where infants were supposed to learn all production-perception patterns by imitation early in childhood.