Liberman and Mattingly (1985)
LIBERMAN, Alvin M., and Ignatius G. Mattingly. “The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised.” Cognition 21 (1985): 1-36.
A highly involved and influential paper. This is a revision of the motor theory which had been developed during the early 1950s by Liberman and colleagues. Essentially the motor theory provides that the object of speech perceptions is not the acoustic elements of an utterance per se, but rather the productive gestures by which the auditory elements arise. The reason for such a theory is the simple fact that listeners consistently produce phonological categorization with a seeming disregard for the great variety in the actual stimuli that prompt them. It is the contention of the theory that phonological elements are naturally distorted, relative to the surrounding phonemes, on the basis of the physics of the vocal production. It is an implicit analysis of these distortions that leads a listener to classify sounds, in terms of the vocal procedures involved.
