A core premise of the Perceptual Assimilation Model of non-native speech perception [PAM: Best, 1995; Best & Tyler, 2007] is that adults perceive unfamiliar non-native phones in terms of articulatory similarities/dissimilarities to native phonemes and contrasts. The implied attunement to native speech emerges early:  As infants begin to discern the articulatory organization of native speech, language-specific effects in non-native speech perception appear (~ 6-10 months). Given that non-native phones, by definition, deviate phonetically from native ones, how can we characterize “articulatory similarity” in concrete, testable ways? The Articulatory Organ Hypothesis [AO: Studdert-Kennedy & Goldstein, 2003; Goldstein & Fowler, 2003] offers a possible approach, positing that infants decompose the oral-facial system into distinct articulatory organs (e.g., lips; tongue tip; tongue dorsum) and are sensitive to their actions in producing vocal tract constrictions. Thus, between-organ contrasts should be easily perceived/learned by infants and adults, whereas detection of within-organ contrasts must become attuned to the distribution of differing constriction locations/types by that organ in input speech. We discuss articulatory, attunement modeling, and perceptual evidence consistent with these predictions, and present a revised version of PAM that incorporates the AO Hypothesis and related principles of Articulatory Phonology [Browman & Goldstein, 1991]. [Supported by NIH]

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