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Evidence in the literature on speech perception shows very clearly that listeners recover a talker's phonetic gestures from the acoustic speech signal. Throughout most of its history, the Motor Theory has been the only theory to confront this evidence and to provide an explanation for it. Specifically, the Motor Theory proposes that the dimensions of a listener's percept of a speech utterance conform more closely to those of a talker's phonetic gestures than to those of the acoustic speech signal, because, according to the theory, listeners access their speech motor systems in perception. Accordingly, their experience hearing a speech utterance conforms to processes that their own motor systems would engage in to produce a signal like the one they are perceiving. If the Motor Theory is correct, speech perception is quite unlike general auditory perception where access to a motor system could not be involved and where …