Читать книгу The Handbook of Speech Perception - Группа авторов - Страница 67

If the two processes of perception and production of speech share a common representation or resource, there should be evidence that the performance of one process can interfere with or in some cases enhance the performance of the other process. There are tantalizing findings of this kind in the speech perception–production literature. At the adult level, there are a series of imaging studies and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies that document possible interference or enhancement effects (see Skipper, Devlin, & Lametti, 2017, for a review; cf. Hickok, 2014, for a critical review of findings that relate to the mirror neuron hypothesis; Hickok, Holt, & Lotto, 2009, for criticism of motor influences on perception). Janet Werker and colleagues have reported a series of intriguing studies on early speech development that relate production to perceptual abilities (e.g. Bruderer et al., 2015). As has previously been shown by Werker and others, young infants are capable of perceptually making nonnative phonetic category distinctions. Using unique methods, they have shown that the ability to make these perceptual distinctions is reduced when the effector responsible for producing the distinction (i.e. the tongue in Bruderer et al.’s 2015 study) is interfered with by a custom‐designed soother. When a different soother, which did not interfere with the tongue’s movement, was used during the perceptual phase of the study, no perceptual interference was observed. Infants could perceive the lingual nonnative contrast if the tongue was not constrained by a soother. These six‐month‐old infants had not learned their perceptual or productive native sound inventory at the point of testing. Yet, there appears to be a sensorimotor linkage between phonetic perception and the articulatory system. In a follow‐up study, Choi, Bruderer, and Werker (2019) showed that the perception of nonnative contrasts as shown by Bruderer et al., and native contrasts (e.g. a /b/–/d/ distinction) can be interfered with by soothers that block the movement of key articulators in the production of the distinction (e.g. tongue tip, lips). These studies suggest a direct linkage between the speech motor and perception systems (Bruderer et al., 2015). Further, the results suggest an auditory–effector mapping that is available very early in development.

Influences in early infant speech behavior have also been shown from the other direction. Speech‐production tendencies can be correlated with developing perceptual abilities (e.g. Majorano, Vihman, & DePaolis, 2014; DePaolis, Vihman, & Keren‐Portnoy, 2011). Majorano, Vihman, and DePaolis (2014) tested children learning Italian at 6, 12, and 18 months. At the end of the first year, children whose production favored a single vocal motor pattern, showed a perceptual preference for sounds resulting from those speech movement patterns.