The Motor Theory of Speech Perception

Ok, so like I talked about in my previous two posts, modelling speech perception is an ongoing problem with a lot of hurdles left to jump. But there are potential candidate theories out there, all of which offer good insight into the problem. The first one I’m going to talk about is motor theory.

So motor theory has one basic premise and three major claims.  The basic premise is a keen observation: we don’t just perceive speech sounds, we also make them. Whoa, stop the presses. Ok, so maybe it seems really obvious, but motor theory was really the first major attempt to model speech perception that took this into account. Up until it was first posited in the 1960’s , people had pretty much been ignoring that and treating speech perception like the only information listeners had access to was what was in the acoustic speech signal. We’ll discuss that in greater detail, later, but it’s still pretty much the way a lot of people approach the problem. I don’t know of a piece of voice recognition software, for example, that include an anatomical model.

So what’s the fact that listeners are listener/speakers get you? Well, remember how there aren’t really invariant units in the speech signal? Well, if you decide that what people are actually perceiving aren’t actually a collection of acoustic markers that point to one particular language sound but instead the gestures needed to make up that sound, then suddenly that’s much less of a problem. To put it in another way, we’re used to thinking of speech being made up of a bunch of sounds, and that when we’re listening speech we’re deciding what the right sounds are and from there picking the right words. But from a motor theory standpoint, what you’re actually doing when you’re listening to speech is deciding what the speaker’s doing with their mouth and using that information to figure out what words they’re saying. So in the dictionary in your head, you don’t store words as strings of sounds but rather as strings of gestures. 

If you’re like me when I first encountered this theory, it’s about this time that you’re starting to get pretty skeptical. I mean, I basically just said that what you’re hearing is the actual movement of someone else’s tongue and figuring out what they’re saying by reverse engineering it based on what you know your tongue is doing when you say the same word. (Just FYI, when I say tongue here, I’m referring to the entire vocal tract in its multifaceted glory, but that’s a bit of a mouthful. Pun intended. 😉 ) I mean, yeah, if we accept this it gives us a big advantage when we’re talking about language acquisition–since if you’re listening to gestures, you can learn them just by listening–but still. It’s weird. I’m going to need some convincing.

Well, let’s get back to the those three principles I mentioned earlier, which are taken from Galantucci, Flower and Turvey’s excellent review of motor theory.

1. Speech is a weird thing to perceive and pretty much does its own thing. I’ve talked about this at length, so let’s just take that as a given for now.
2. When we’re listening to speech, we’re actually listening to gestures. We talked about that above. 
   
3. We use our motor system to help us perceive speech.

Ok, so point three should jump out at you a bit. Why? Of these three points, its the easiest one to test empirically. And since I’m a huge fan of empirically testing things (Science! Data! Statistics!) we can look into the literature and see if there’s anything that supports this. Like, for example, a study that shows that when listening to speech, our motor cortex gets all involved. Well, it turns out that there  are lots of studies that show this. You know that term “active listening”? There’s pretty strong evidence that it’s more than just a metaphor; listening to speech involves our motor system in ways that not all acoustic inputs do.

So point three is pretty well supported. What does that mean for point two? It really depends on who you’re talking to. (Science is all about arguing about things, after all.) Personally, I think motor theory is really interesting and address a lot of the problems we face in trying to model speech perception. But I’m not ready to swallow it hook, line and sinker. I think Robert Remez put it best in the proceedings of Modularity and The Motor Theory of Speech Perception:

I think it is clear that Motor Theory is false. For the other, I think the evidence indicates no less that Motor Theory is essentially, fundamentally, primarily and basically true. (p. 179)

On the one hand, it’s clear that our motor system is involved in speech perception. On the other, I really do think that we use parts of the acoustic signal in and of themselves. But we’ll get into that in more depth next week.