Filling the perceptuo-motor gap

Résumé En

The session under focus deals with phonetic articulatory-acoustic variation and with the link between phonetic detail and phonological modelling. The underlying question was to estimate the impact of phonetic detail on the phonological status of a given unit, and to attempt to better understand how details are produced by the speaker or exploited by the listener to access (encode or decode) the phonological level. But what is over and over at work in the four papers of this session is the possibility that there could exist a gap between the speaker's intention and the listener's perception, and that the phonetic variation is in some sense contained, produced or at least made possible by this gap. The present discussion will be focused on the perceptuo-motor gap. In an initial section, I will briefly recall how speech communication theories deal with the perceptuo-motor link. Then, I will discuss each of the four papers of the session, around a single question - What does a listener know about a speaker's gesture? - that is, what does the corresponding study tell us about the perceptuo-motor gap. Finally, I shall conclude around the theory that we have developed at ICP, called PACT (for "Perception-for-Action-Control Theory") in an attempt to show how it could indeed contribute to "fill the perceptuo-motor gap".