# Transfer of statistical learning from speech perception to production generalizes to reading

## TL;DR

This study shows that learning from speech sounds can influence how people read aloud, even without hearing examples.

## Contribution

The research demonstrates that perception-production transfer generalizes to reading without an auditory model.

## Key findings

- Exposure to different speech distributions alters how people read aloud words like BEER and PEER.
- The effect generalizes to new word pairs and nonwords, showing broad learning.
- Perception-production transfer occurs in tasks without explicit auditory models.

## Abstract

Past research has shown that short-term exposure to speech carrying certain acoustic statistics transfers robustly to speech production. However, all studies reporting such transfer have used auditory repetition tasks. Therefore, it is unclear whether perception-production transfer in the acoustic-phonetic domain extends to tasks without an auditory model to probe production. We answer this question in two experiments. Experiment 1 shows that people read aloud the words BEER and PEER differently after exposure to auditory samples of “beer” and “peer” drawn from a distribution of standard American English versus a distribution of slightly accented speech. Experiments 2A and 2B replicate this finding and show generalization to reading a new word pair (BEACH/PEACH) and a new nonword pair (BEETH/PEETH). Collectively, these results demonstrate that the perception-production transfer in the acoustic-phonetic domain extends beyond auditory repetition tasks to production tasks without an explicit auditory model, and that this transfer generalizes to new syllables.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-026-02874-y.