Can link arise by the child learning to associate the acoustic consequences of its own speech with the gestures it used to produce them? (ie., covert mimicry)

Arguments against:

• people who are pathologically incapable (from birth) of controlling their articulators are able to perceive speech.
• pre-linguistic (indeed, pre-babbling) infants can perceive phonetic distinctions as adults do.

  In addition (not presented by L&M):

  Even if child could develop a mapping from the sounds that it produces to its own gestures, it is not clear how this mapping could be applied to the speech it hears adults produce.

  Child has very different size vocal tract, and therefore its resonances are quite different than adults. (Also its sound source is very different from adults). How could the child match, on the basis of the sound alone, an adult's utterance with one it produced itself?

  Conclusion: Link is innate.

Role of innate perception-production link in the development of speech perception

• When is a signal speech?

  The motor theory claims that there are no superficial characteristics that allow listeners to distinguish speech from non-speech--the only criterion is whether or not a signal could have been produced by linguistic gestures.

  This suggests that infants must use an innate perception-production link in order to know when they have heard a speech signal at all.

• The basis for phonetic categories

  Establishment of phonetic categories on the basis of acoustic properties alone is not possible.

  Associating any particular set of cues with a phonetic category is arbitrary, and will not allow the category to generalize appropriately to other contexts, other speakers.

  Only if the infant can appreciate the gestural structure of speech can the basis for phonetic categories be appreciated.

How specific to speech must a perception-production link be?