Shared and distinct neural correlates of vowel perception and production

Recent neurobiological models postulate that sensorimotor interactions play a key role in speech perception and speech motor control, especially under adverse listening conditions or in case of complex articulatory speech sequences. The present fMRI study aimed to investigate whether isolated vowel perception and production might also induce sensorimotor activity, independently of syllable sequencing and coarticulation mechanisms and using a sparse acquisition technique in order to limit influence of scanner noise. To this aim, participants first passively listened to French vowels previously recorded from their own voice. In a subsequent production task, done within the same imaging session and using the same acquisition parameters, participants were asked to overtly produce the same vowels. Our results demonstrate that a left postero-dorsal stream, linking auditory speech percepts with articulatory representations and including the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, the adjacent ventral premotor cortex and the temporoparietal junction, is an influential part of both vowel perception and production. Specific analyses on phonetic features further confirmed the involvement of the left postero-dorsal stream in vowel processing and motor control. Altogether, these results suggest that vowel representations are largely distributed over sensorimotor brain areas and provide further evidence for a functional coupling between speech perception and production systems. ► Sparse sampling fMRI study of vowel perception and production. ► Implication of a left postero-dorsal stream in both vowel perception and production. ► Vowel representations distributed over sensorimotor brain areas. ► Support for a close relationship between speech perception and production.