Reply to Skoyles: Direct acoustic-toarticulatorylinks have functionalsignificance and historical precedent

摘要

Skoyles (1) makes two useful contributions to thinking aboutmotor involvement in speech perception. The first is to providea valuable historical perspective on the findings of Yuen et al.(2), demonstrating that the notion of a direct acoustic-toarticulatorymapping has long-standing precedents from avariety of sources. The second is to hypothesize that thisdirect mapping may be critical for the acquisition of spokenvocabulary, a proposal that we note is consistent with evidenceconcerning the role of articulatory rehearsal processes in vocabularyacquisition (3). However, we disagree with Skoyles (1)that there is a fundamental difference between the “speechmapping” process that he proposes and our own account.Both theories are based on the notion that there is a directmapping between acoustic and articulatory information, suchthat articulatory information is activated automaticallywhenever speech is heard. The only theoretical issue at stakeis whether the activation of articulatory information co-occurswith speech comprehension—an issue that Yuen et al. didnot (and could not) comment on but that we are currentlyinvestigating.