Exposure to an Accent Transfers to Speech Production in a Single Shot

Listening to another speaker’s voice can lead to predictable changes in the listener’s own voice. This means that perception can alter production. A key question is whether overt production and its auditory consequences are critical for observing such changes. We answer this question in two experiments (N = 269) by passively exposing participants to speech that carries different acoustic patterns and investigating changes to production. Experiment 1 shows that decreasing the number of productions by an order of magnitude does not decrease the influence of perception on production. Experiment 2 takes this further by demonstrating that perceptual influence manifests on the very first overt production after exposure to new speech regularities. Collectively, these results show that perception can alter production without relying on feedback from overt production and its auditory consequences. This finding, in turn, points strongly to the need for extending current speech production models to include internal simulations.