Speech Motor Control is Not Sequestered from General Auditory Processes

There is growing recognition that short-term changes in speech perception influence speech production. These effects shed light on phonetic convergence – the subtle alignment of speech patterns that emerges between communication partners – and offer insights into interactions of perception and production. Across three experiments, we investigate the representations underlying perceptual effects on speech production. Building from the strong influence of preceding context on speech perception, we strategically pair contexts and target syllables to enhance or diminish target syllables’ perceptual distinctiveness and examine the impact of these perceptual effects on 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 impact 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 points to 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 perception-production interactions.