Speech Perception in Children with a Cleft Palate: Preliminary Data

Research into how speech production and perception are related has a long history. Proponents of the motor theory of speech perception argued in the sixties that speech sounds are perceived in terms of the articulatory features or gestures required to produce those sounds (Liberman et al., 1967; Liberman, 1996). The prediction was that infants, who do not yet produce speech sounds, would have difficulty with speech perception. Testing this claim set of a vibrant research field on infants’ speech perception. Contrary to the motor theory of speech perception, the seminal study by Eimas et al. (1971) showed among others that (categorical) speech perception was part of the biological endowment for language and that production was not necessary to perceive speech. When experimental work showed that infants were able to discriminate virtually all speech contrasts they were tested on, the theory lost in popularity. Nowadays, the common assumption is that speech perception precedes and even predicts speech production (e.g. Kuhl, 2004, Tsao, Liu & Kuhl, 2004). Recently, however, there is renewed interest for the relationship between speech perception and production. The discovery of mirror neurons and the identification of active motor areas involved in both speaking and listening to speech (Wilson, Saygin, Sereno & Iacoboni, 2004) suggests that speech perception and production are closely linked. Imada and colleagues (2006) demonstrated that infants’ motor and premotor areas in the cortex are activated when listening to speech, just as in adults, (Hickok & Poeppel, 2007). More recently, Bruderer et al. (2015) argued that sensorimotor information from the articulators influences speech perception. In their study six-month-old infants were tested on the same dental-retroflex contrast as used in their earlier 1984