Analogy and Disanalogy in Production and Perception of Speech.

A varied psychological vocabulary now describes the cognitive and social conditions of language production, the ultimate result of which is the mechanical action of vocal musculature in spoken expression. Following the logic of the speech chain, descriptions of production have often exhibited a clear analogy to accounts of perception. This reciprocality is especially evident in explanations that rely on reafference to control production, on articulation to inform perception, and on strict parity between produced and perceived form to provide invariance in the relation between abstract linguistic objects and observed expression. However, a causal account of production and perception cannot derive solely from this hopeful analogy. Despite sharing of abstract linguistic representations, the control functions in production and perception as well as the constraints on their use stand in fundamental disanalogy. This is readily seen in the different adaptive challenges to production - to speak in a single voice - and perception - to resolve familiar linguistic properties in any voice. This acknowledgment sets descriptive and theoretical challenges that break the symmetry of production and perception. As a consequence, this recognition dislodges an old impasse between the psychoacoustic and motoric accounts in the regulation of production and perception.