Ken Stevens and motor theories

At an ASA meeting long ago, Ken Stevens said he had a confession to make, one that I wouldn’t like. “I think I’m becoming a motor theorist,” he said with a little laugh. I registered the surprise he expected and said, “Traditional Motor Theory?” He replied, “not exactly,” and described the sensory and motor components of Quantal Theory. In today’s talk, I’ll review preliminary data from a collaboration between my laboratory and neuroscientists at Washington University (Marc Raichle, Abraham Synder) and Stanford University (Anish Mitra). We are using resting state fMRI experiments to measure spontaneous infra-slow brain activity representing information flow between sensory (Wernicke’s) and motor (Broca’s) brain areas in newborns, 6-, 12-, and 24-month-old infants, as well as adults, and to link information flow in early development to a child’s emergent language skills. If supported, our hypothesis will help explain infants’ abilities to integrate sensory and motor information early in development. Moreover, our data have the potential to substantially alter current theories, creating a sensorimotor theory of speech development, one that I believe Ken Stevens (and traditional motor theorists like Al Liberman) would welcome.