The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates.[1][2][3][4][5] It originally claimed that speech perception is done through a specialized module that is innate and human-specific. Though the idea of a module has been qualified in more recent versions of the theory,[5] the idea remains that the role of the speech motor system is not only to produce speech articulations but also to detect them.
^Liberman, A. M.; Cooper, F. S.; Shankweiler, D. P.; Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). "Perception of the speech code". Psychological Review. 74 (6): 431–461. doi:10.1037/h0020279. PMID4170865.