Perceptuomotor adaptation to a speech feature

Selective adaptation experiments were conducted to test for the presence of a mechanism that mediates an aspect of both speech perception and speech production. Ss were instructed to utter /i/ or /bi/ after listening to repetitions of either of these syllables or to repetitions of the vowel /i/. Analysis of the utterances showed that a timing relation which distinguishes /pi/from /bi/, namely the latency in onset of voicing relative to the release burst of the consonant, varied systematically for the /pi/ utterances but not for the /bi/ utterances as a function of the speech input. The effect for the /pi/ utterances was shown not to be attributable to factors such as compensation for distorted perception of the /pi/ adapting stimulus or voluntary mimicry of this stimulus.