Speech repetition

Speech repetition occurs when individuals speak the sounds that they have heard another person pronounce or say. In other words, it is the saying by one individual of the spoken vocalizations made by another individual. Speech repetition requires the person repeating the utterance to have the ability to map the sounds that they hear from the other person's oral pronunciation to similar places and manners of articulation in their own vocal tract.

Such speech imitation often occurs independently of speech comprehension such as in speech shadowing in which people automatically say words heard in earphones, and the pathological condition of echolalia in which people reflexively repeat overheard words. That links to speech repetition of words being separate in the brain to speech perception. Speech repetition occurs in the dorsal speech processing stream, and speech perception occurs in the ventral speech processing stream. Repetitions are often incorporated unawares by that route into spontaneous novel sentences immediately or after delay after the storage in phonological memory.

In humans, the ability to map heard input vocalizations into motor output is highly developed because of the copying ability playing a critical role in children's rapid expansion of their spoken vocabulary. In older children and adults, that ability remains important, as it enables the continued learning of novel words and names and additional languages. That repetition is also necessary for the propagation of language from generation to generation. It has also been suggested that the phonetic units out of which speech is made have been selected upon by the process of vocabulary expansion and vocabulary transmissions because children prefer to copy words in terms of more easily-imitated elementary units.