Exploring the relationship between speech perception and production across phonological processes, language familiarity, and sensory modalities

ABSTRACT

Current speech perception models disagree over the role of speech production in speech perception. In the current study we aimed to characterise the relationship between speech perception and production by testing a large sample of early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in a variety of speech perception and production tasks. Speech perception was measured for different phonological processes (sub-lexical and phono-lexical), different language familiarities (native, second, and unknown language), and different sensory modalities (auditory and audio-visual). Speech production ability was assessed in the second language. Non-linguistic auditory and sensory motor abilities were also measured. We used factor analysis to look at the relations between the variables. Results showed a tight relationship between speech perception and production measurements, which was present across phonological processes and language familiarities but was independent of audio-visual and non-linguistic (auditory and sensory-motor) skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Speech perception
• speech production
• phonological processes
• language familiarity
• audio-visual integration

Acknowledgements

We thank Robert Frank de Menezes, Mireia Martín, and Aina Pinyol for help with the data acquisition, Miguel Burgaleta for help with the factor analysis, Carolina Sánchez-García and Salvador Soto-Faraco for sending us the stimuli of the audio-visual task, and Silvia Blanch and Xavier Mayoral for the technical support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by grants from the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme [grant number FP7/2007-2013]: ERC grant [agreement number 323961 (UNDER CONTROL)]; the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [grant number PSI201566918-P] and the Catalan Government [grant number SGR 2014-1210] awarded to NSG. NSG also received the “ICREA Acadèmia” prize for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. BD received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme [grant number FP7/2007-2013] under REA grant agreement n 32867 and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government [Juan de la Cierva fellowship JCI-2012-12678].