Listeners beware: Speech production may be bad for learning speech sounds

Abstract

Spoken language requires individuals to both perceive and produce speech. Because both processes access lexical and sublexical representations, it is commonly assumed that perception and production involve cooperative processes. However, few studies have directly examined the nature of the relationship between the two modalities, particularly how producing speech influences speech perception. In a series of experiments, we examine the counter-intuitive finding that learning perceptual representations can be disrupted by producing tokens during training. We investigate whether this disruption can be alleviated by prior experience with the speech sounds, and whether the cause of the disruption is production of the particular sound being learned, or is a more general conflict between the production system and the system that develops new perceptual representations. Our results paint a more competitive relationship between perception and production than might be assumed and suggest that both demands inherent to production and cognitive demands modulate this relationship.