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There is growing recognition that short-term changes in speech perception influence speech production. These effects offer new insight into interactions of perception and production and shed light on phonetic convergence, the subtle alignment of speech patterns that emerges between communication partners. Across three experiments, we investigate the representations underlying perceptual effects on speech production. Building from the established influence of preceding context on speech perception, we strategically pair contexts to shift perception of target syllables and test whether these perceptual effects influence speech production. Experiment 1 shows that speech contexts rich in articulatory-phonetic information shift speech perception and alter acoustic patterns of speech production. Experiment 2 demonstrates that continuous natural speech filtered to possess subtly different spectral profiles that do not impact articulatory-phonetic information also affect both perception and production. Strikingly, Experiment 3 reveals that even nonspeech tones induce perceptual context effects that influence speech production. The findings point to a much broader scope of perception-production transfer than reported previously, and challenge the necessity of social interaction, covert imitation, and articulatory-phonetic information in sensorimotor speech interactions. This emphasizes the need to extend models of speech motor control to account for perceptual influences of other talkers’ speech on speech production, and to accommodate general auditory processes in sensorimotor models of speech.
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This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2027
Exposure to an accent transfers to speech production in a single shot
Listening to another speaker’s voice can lead to predictable changes in a listener’s own voice. This means that perception can alter production. A key question is whether overt production and its auditory consequences are critical for observing such changes. We answer this question in two experiments (N = 269) by passively exposing participants to speech that carries different acoustic patterns and investigating changes to production. Experiment 1 shows that decreasing the number of productions by an order of magnitude does not decrease the influence of perception on production. Experiment 2 takes this further by demonstrating that perceptual influence manifests on the very first overt production after exposure to new speech regularities. Collectively, these results show that perception can alter production without relying on feedback from overt production and its auditory consequences. This finding, in turn, strongly supports speech production models that include internal simulations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2346989
- PAR ID:
- 10679940
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cognition
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cognition
- Volume:
- 270
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0010-0277
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 106412
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Speech perception, speech production, motor control, auditory feedback, single-shot learning, statistical learning
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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