Sensory-motor interactions in speech perception, production and imitation: behavioral evidence from close shadowing, perceptuo-motor phonemic organization and imitative changes.

International audienceSpeech communication can be viewed as an interactive process involving a functional coupling between sensory and motor systems. In the present study, we combined three classical experimental paradigms to further test perceptuomotor interactions in both speech perception and production. In a first close shadowing experiment, auditory and audiovisual syllable identification led to faster oral than manual responses. In a second experiment, participants were asked to produce and to listen to French vowels, varying from height feature, in order to test perceptuo-motor phonemic organization and idiosyncrasies. In a third experiment, online imitative changes on the fundamental frequency in relation to acoustic vowel targets were observed in a non-interactive situation of communication during both unintentional and voluntary imitative production tasks. Altogether our results appear exquisitely in line with a functional coupling between action and perception speech systems and provide further evidence for a sensory-motor nature of speech representations