Language enables the acquisition of distinct sensorimotor memories for speech.

Abstract

Interactions between the context in which a sensorimotor skill is learned and the recall of that memory have been primarily studied in limb movements, but speech production requires movement, and many aspects of speech processing are influenced by task-relevant contextual information. Here, in ecologically valid speech (read sentences), we test whether English-French bilinguals can use the language of production to acquire and recall distinct motor plans for similar speech sounds spanning the production workspace. Participants experienced real-time alterations of auditory feedback while producing interleaved English and French sentences. The alterations were equal in magnitude but opposite in direction between languages. Over three experiments (n = 15 in each), we observed language-specific sensorimotor learning in speech that countered the alterations and persisted after the alterations were removed. The effects were not observed in a fourth experiment (n = 15) when the feedback alterations were tied to a non-linguistic cue. In a fifth experiment (n = 15), we provide further confirmation that the observed language-specific changes in speech production were confined to sentence production, the linguistic level at which they were learned. The results contrast with recent work and theories of second language learning that predict broad interference between L1 and L2 phonetic representations. When faced with contrasting sensorimotor demands between languages, bilinguals readily acquire and recall highly specific motor representations for speech.