This chapter aims at describing how speech is multimodal not only in its perception but also in its production. It first focuses on multimodal perception of speech segments and speech prosody. It describes how multimodal perception is linked to speech production and explains why we consider speech perception as a sensory-motor process. It then analyses some aspects of hand-mouth coordination in...

Previous studies have shown that children learning alphabetic writing systems who have language impairment or dyslexia exhibit speech perception deficits. However, whether such deficits exist in children learning logographic writing systems who have poor reading comprehension remains uncertain. To further explore this issue, the present study examined speech perception deficits in Mandarin-spea...

According to a traditional view, speech perception and production are processed largely separately in sensory and motor brain areas. Recent psycholinguistic and neuroimaging studies provide novel evidence that the sensory and motor systems dynamically interact in speech processing, by demonstrating that speech perception and imitation share regional brain activations. However, the exact nature ...

The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This sugge...

Objectives: Auditory perception or hearing ability is critical for children in acquisition of language and speech hence hearing loss has different effects on individuals’ linguistic perception, and also on their functions. It seems that deaf people suffer from language and speech impairments such as in perception of complex linguistic constructions. This research was aimed to study the pe...

Cochlear implantation is a standard intervention for deafness, yet the ability of implanted patients to understand speech varies widely. To better understand this variability, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to image auditory cortex activation in response to different classes of sound and compared that to behavioral measures of speech perception. Both control and implanted partici...

Speech perception is the process by which listeners presented with a distribution of audible frequencies modulated in amplitude (loudness) and spectral (the frequency set) content across time turn this sound into a coherent unit of perception that is interpreted as language. Classic studies established that speech is not perceived by simplymapping sets of invariant acoustic properties onto diff...

Language experience systematically constrains perception of speech contrasts that deviate phonologically and/or phonetically from those of the listener’s native language. These effects are most dramatic in adults, but begin to emerge in infancy and undergo further development through at least early childhood. The central question addressed here is: How do nonnative speech perception findings be...