Examining the link between speech perception and production through categorical boundaries

The link between speech perception and production is one of the central topics in speech perception theories. Newman (2003) examined the correlations between acoustic measures of listeners’ perceptual and production prototypes for a given speech category, and found significant correlations for stop consonants (VOT) and for voiceless fricatives (spectral peaks). Shultz et al. (2012) also investigated the possible link between perception and production by examining speakers’ relative cue weighting of VOT and f0 in word initial stops. Although their results showed no significant correlation between weighting of VOT in production and perception, they reported a trend toward a slightly positive correlation between production and perception for VOT values. The current study extends these findings and aims to explore the perception-production link by examining the relationship between the location of categorical boundaries (between /p/ and /b/) in perception and production. If mental representations for perception and production are directly linked, then speakers with higher VOT values in both categories in production would be expected to also show a higher categorical boundary in perception.