Legacy: Decades of Discovery - 1980s
Alvin Liberman and Ignatius Mattingly revised and updated the motor theory, recasting it in an explicitly biological frame. They posited a specialized “phonetic module,” encompassing both production and perception, analogous in some respects to modules for sound localization in the bat, the barn owl, and humans. The revised motor theory remains viable, though controversial, today.
Freddie Bell-Berti showed that vocal tract configurations underlying a given phonological contrast (consonant voicing, for instance) entail active (or passive) engagement of all the articulators, not only those effecting the contrast.
Studies of different writing systems over the next two decades supported the controversial hypothesis that all reading necessarily activates the phonological form of a word before, or at the same time as, its meaning. Work included experiments by George Lukatela, Michael Turvey, Leonard Katz, Laurie Feldman, Ram Frost, and others in the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets of Serbo-Croatian, by Shlomo Bentin, Frost, and Katz in Hebrew, and by Ignatius Mattingly and Feldman in Chinese.
Several researchers developed compatible theoretical accounts of speech production, speech perception, and phonological knowledge:
• Carol Fowler proposed a “direct realism” theory of speech perception: listeners perceive gestures not by means of a specialized decoder, as in the motor theory, but because information in the acoustic signal specifies the gestures that form it.
• Inspired by Michael Turvey’s earlier work on “action theory,” Carol Fowler, Philip Rubin, Robert Remez, and Turvey proposed a theory of speech production in which phonetic goals (such as closing the lips, raising the tongue or opening the vocal cords) are achieved by transient, special-purpose organizations of the articulators, termed “coordinative structures” or “synergies.”
• Scott Kelso and colleagues demonstrated functional synergies in speech gestures experimentally. When one articulator in a synergy is perturbed (when the jaw is tugged down, for instance, as the lips close to form /b/), other articulators (in this instance the lips) automatically compensate to achieve lip closure.
• Elliot Saltzman and colleagues developed a dynamical systems theory of synergetic action and implemented the theory, known as task dynamics, as a working model of speech production, in which actions of the articulators are gestures that form and release constrictions in the vocal tract.
• Linguists Catherine Browman and Louis Goldstein developed the theory of “articulatory phonology,” in which gestures are the basic units of both phonetic action and phonological knowledge. The associated “linguistic gestural model” generates appropriately phased patterns of gesture for words in English. These “gestural scores,” assigned dynamic values by the task dynamics model of Elliot Saltzman and colleagues, drive the articulatory synthesizer of Philip Rubin and Paul Mermelstein to produce intelligible speech.
Giuseppe Cossu, Isabelle Liberman, and Donald Shankweiler were among the first to present evidence that difficulties in acquiring phoneme awareness and ensuing problems in word recognition characterize reading disability across different languages that use an alphabet.
Donald Shankweiler, Stephen Crain, Virginia Mann, and Paul Macaruso presented evidence that language comprehension difficulties associated with reading disability are typically based on processing limitations, not deficiencies of grammatical knowledge.
Gloria Borden and Katherine S. Harris published Speech Science Primer, a graduate and advanced undergraduate introduction to speech science. First published in 1980 and later revised in collaboration with Lawrence Raphael as the first author, the book is now in its 6th edition.
• 1930s
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• 1970s
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