Effects of somatosensory perturbation on the perception of French /u/.

In a study of whether somatosensory feedback related to articulatory configuration is involved in speech perception, 30 French-speaking adults performed a speech discrimination task in which vowel pairs along the French /u/ (rounded vowel requiring a small lip area) to /œ/ (rounded vowel associated with larger lip area) continuum were used as stimuli. Listeners had to perform the test in two conditions: with a 2-cm-diameter lip-tube in place (mimicking /œ/) and without the lip-tube (neutral lip position). Results show that, in the lip-tube condition, listeners perceived more stimuli as /œ/, in line with the proposal that an auditory-somatosensory interaction exists.