Current speech perception models disagree over the role of speech production in speech perception. In the current study we aimed to characterise the relationship between speech perception and production by testing a large sample of early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in a variety of speech perception and production tasks. Speech perception was measured for different phonological processes (sub-lexical and phono-lexical), different language familiarities (native, second, and unknown language), and different sensory modalities (auditory and audio-visual). Speech production ability was assessed in the second language. Non-linguistic auditory and sensory motor abilities were also measured. We used factor analysis to look at the relations between the variables. Results showed a tight relationship between speech perception and production measurements, which was present across phonological processes and language familiarities but was independent of audio-visual and non-linguistic (auditory and sensory-motor) skills.

This research was funded by grants from the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013): ERG grant agreement number 323961 (UNDER CONTROL); the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (PSI201566918-P) and the Catalan Government (SGR 2014–1210) awarded to NSG. NSG also received the ‘‘ICREA Acadèmia’’ prize for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. BD received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under REA grant agreement n 32867 and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government (Juan de la Cierva fellowship JCI-2012- 12678).