Edinburgh Napier University

  It has been proposed that speech-motor activation observed during comprehension may, in part, reflect involvement of the speech-motor system in the top-down simulation of upcoming material [14]. In the current study we employed an automated approach to the analysis of ultrasound tongue imaging in order to investigate whether comprehension-elicited effects are observable at an articulatory-output level.
We investigated whether and how lexical predictions affect speech-motor output. Effects were found at a relatively early point during the pre-acoustic phase of articulation, and did not appear to be predicated upon the nature of the phonological-overlap between predicted and named items. In these respects effects related to comprehension-elicited predictions appear to differ in nature from those observed in production and perception experiments.