The motor theory of speech perception revised

Liberman, Alvin M.; Mattingly, Ignatius G.

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(85)90021-6

Cited by 2,258 publications

(1,499 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…The uniqueness and complexity of speech perception have lead some to argue that it is qualitatively different from other cognitive capacities (Liberman and Mattingly, 1985). However, studies to this effect are complicated by the fact that perceiving speech represents the confluence of two separate tasks: recognizing both the phonetic form and the semantic content encoded within an auditory signal.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first holds that humans possess neural systems that are uniquely adapted for mapping acoustic speech to internal representations of articulatory gestures. As such, the process by which humans perceive speech signals is thought to be radically different from how nonspeech auditory signals are perceived (Liberman and Mattingly, 1985). In contrast, other theories hold that more general auditory processing mechanisms are recruited for speech processing (Bregman, 1990;Massaro, 1997), suggesting that overlapping neural systems are responsible for processing both speech and nonspeech information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Overlapping neural regions for processing rapid temporal cues in speech and nonspeech signals☆

Joanisse

Gati

2003

NeuroImage

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Speech perception involves recovering the phonetic form of speech from a dynamic auditory signal containing both time-varying and steady-state cues. We examined the roles of inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex in processing these aspects of auditory speech and nonspeech signals. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to record activation in superior temporal gyrus (STG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) while participants discriminated pairs of either speech syllables or nonspeech tones. Speech stimuli differed in either the consonant or the vowel portion of the syllable, whereas the nonspeech signals consisted of sinewave tones differing along either a dynamic or a spectral dimension. Analyses failed to identify regions of activation that clearly contrasted the speech and nonspeech conditions. However, we did identify regions in the posterior portion of left and right STG and left IFG yielding greater activation for both speech and nonspeech conditions that involved rapid temporal discrimination, compared to speech and nonspeech conditions involving spectral discrimination. The results suggest that, when semantic and lexical factors are adequately ruled out, there is significant overlap in the brain regions involved in processing the rapid temporal characteristics of both speech and nonspeech signals.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overlapping neural regions for processing rapid temporal cues in speech and nonspeech signals☆

Joanisse

Gati

2003

NeuroImage

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“…Will other visual cues, such as congruency with objects, also induce phonetic categorization, or is this effect restricted to visual speech? After all, one theory holds that infants learn to produce speech sounds by viewing speech sounds being articulated (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985;Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, & Griffith, 1957).…”

Section: Do Semantic Cues Guide Phonetic Learning?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Schure

Junge

Boersma

2016

Infant Behavior and Development

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Semantics guide infants' vowel learning: computational and experimental evidenceter Schure, S.M.M.; Junge, C.M.M.; Boersma, P.P.G. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. a b s t r a c tIn their first year, infants' perceptual abilities zoom in on only those speech sound contrasts that are relevant for their language. Infants' lexicons do not yet contain sufficient minimal pairs to explain this phonetic categorization process. Therefore, researchers suggested a bottom-up learning mechanism: infants create categories aligned with the frequency distributions of sounds in their input. Recent evidence shows that this bottom-up mechanism may be complemented by the semantic context in which speech sounds occur, such as simultaneously present objects. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether discrimination of a non-native vowel contrast improves when sounds from the contrast were paired consistently or randomly with two distinct visually presented objects, while the distribution of speech tokens suggested a single broad category. This was assessed in two ways: computationally, namely in a neural network simulation, and experimentally, namely in a group of 8-month-old infants. The neural network, trained with a large set of sound-meaning pairs, revealed that two categories emerge only if sounds are consistently paired with objects. A group of 49 real 8-month-old infants did not immediately show sensitivity to the pairing condition; a later test at 18 months with some of the same infants, however, showed that this sensitivity at 8 months interacted with their vocabulary size at 18 months. This interaction can be explained by the idea that infants with larger future vocabularies are more positively influenced by consistent training (and/or more negatively influenced by inconsistent training) than infants with smaller future vocabularies. This suggests that consistent pairing with distinct visual objects can help infants to discriminate speech sounds even when the auditory information does not signal a distinction. Together our results give computational as well as experimental support for the idea that semantic context plays a role in disambiguating phonetic auditory input.

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“…Liberman proposed three hypotheses in both a weak [1] and a strong version of the Motor Theory [5] . (1) The object of speech perception is the "gesture"; (2) speech processing is special and requires a specific phonetic module; and (3) activation of the motor cortex is involved in speech perception.…”

Section: The Motor Theory Of Speech Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interaction between auditory and motor systems in speech perception

Chen

et al. 2014

Neurosci. Bull.

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Based on the Motor Theory of speech perception, the interaction between the auditory and motor systems plays an essential role in speech perception. Since the Motor Theory was proposed, it has received remarkable attention in the fi eld. However, each of the three hypotheses of the theory still needs further verifi cation. In this review, we focus on how the auditory-motor anatomical and functional associations play a role in speech perception and discuss why previous studies could not reach an agreement and particularly whether the motor system involvement in speech perception is task-load dependent. Finally, we suggest that the function of the auditory-motor link is particularly useful for speech perception under adverse listening conditions and the further revised Motor Theory is a potential solution to the "cocktail-party" problem.

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The motor theory of speech perception revised

Cited by 2,258 publications

References 99 publications

Overlapping neural regions for processing rapid temporal cues in speech and nonspeech signals☆

Overlapping neural regions for processing rapid temporal cues in speech and nonspeech signals☆

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Interaction between auditory and motor systems in speech perception

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