iReasearch学术科研网

The Motor theory of speech perception proposes that the listener receives a speech sound and analyzes it by eliciting an auditory model of his own production of it. Within the academic area of speech science, despite its prominence,the theory is filled with controversy. In this paper the author shows some strong evidence of latest studies in brain science and neuroscience to support the theory and goes a step further to claim: 1) Speech perception and production mechanisms are tightly linked. 2) Different from other non-voice sound perception, speech perception has a strong sense of subjectivity, and such a subjective matter is constrained by language-specific rules. 3) In this way human beings can normalize speech variations to achieve the objective of language communication. 4) Scientists of computer speech recognition should fully consider the characteristic of human speech perception so as to improve the speech recognition rate.