ABSTRACT
Behaviourally, speech production and perception are or have been considered to be linked in many different ways. These range from the possibility of shared phonetic representations (Pulvermüller et al., 2006), to a candidate unifying role of Broca’s area in language processing (Hagoort, 2005), through to notions of a centrality of motor representations in speech perception and embodied perception and cognition (e.g., Zwaan & Kaschak, 2009). Others have argued for a contrasting perspective that links perception and production in a different direction, whereby motor control (in speech as well as in other actions) is essentially dependent on perceptual processing (e.g., Darainy, Vahdat, & Ostry, 2013). In this chapter I will outline the evidence for and against arguments that motor processes are critical to the understanding of speech and also argue for a functional role for motor cortices in the priming and alignment of behavioural responses. I will not be addressing the ways that motor representations form part of a more distributed semantic processing system (e.g., Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers, 2007).
