The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people
perceive spoken words by identifying the
vocal tract
The vocal tract is the cavity in human bodies and in animals where the sound produced at the sound source (larynx in mammals; syrinx in birds) is filtered.
In birds, it consists of the trachea, the syrinx, the oral cavity, the upper part of t ...
gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the
sound
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.
In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the br ...
patterns that speech generates.
It originally claimed that speech perception is done through a specialized
module that is