Motor theory of speech perception: A reply to Lane's critical review

Deals with certain misunderstandings on which H. L. Lane (see 39:5) based his criticism of data that bear on a motor theory of speech perception. Lane criticized experiments that had demonstrated contrasting tendencies toward "categorical" perception of stop consonants and "continuous" perception of vowels and nonspeech sounds. He also undertook to demonstrate that categorical perception of nonspeech sounds can be produced by the ordinary procedures of discrimination training, and so to refute the claim that such perception is an interesting characteristic of the speech mode. It is shown that contrary to Lane's claim, discrimination training is not sufficient to produce categorical perception. (34 ref.)