ABSTRACT
What is the relation between perception and action? The present chapter describes a new theory of this relationship for the most proficient of human skills: the perception and production of speech. I develop the theory in two stages that reflect the classical dintinction between structure (hardware) and function (the real time processes that the hardware undergoes during production or perception). The structural issue concerns the relationship between the mechanisms for perceiving versus producing speech and represents a source of considerable controversy over the past several decades. Some, such as Lashley (1951), argue that perception and production share some of the same mechanisms because “the processes of comprehension and production of speech have too much in common to depend on wholly different mechanisms” (p. 186). Others have assumed separate rather than shared mechanisms for perception and production. For example, Wernicke used cases of aphasia to argue that production is localized in one area of the brain and perception in another, interconnected but separate area (see Straight, 1980). The motor theory (Liberman, Cooper, Harris, & Mac-Neilage, 1962; Studdert-Kennedy, Liberman, Harris, and Cooper, 1970) implicitly makes the same assumption because speech sounds such as stops are perceived with the help of the components that produce them in the motor theory, and this could only occur if the components representing stops differ for perception versus production.
