Decoding Articulatory and Phonetic Features: Somatotopic and Sensorimotor Representations in Native and Non-native Consonant Perception

Articulator-specific features of degraded native French bilabial and dental consonants are mapped somatotopically in right lip and tongue motor areas, linked to consonant production.

• Why it matters: The contribution of motor cortex to speech perception is debated, especially how articulatory and phonetic information is represented when auditory input is clear versus noisy.
• What they did: Using fMRI with MVPA and behavioral measures, participants perceived native French and non-native Mandarin consonants under clear and noisy conditions, including cross-modal classification and representational similarity analysis.
• The result: A bilateral temporal–frontal motor network encodes phonetic features (place and manner) for both native and non-native consonants, suggesting sensorimotor support for categorization under degraded input.

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