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Predictive Timing in Speech Perception and Production

Subject Area General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term from 2016 to 2025
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 315230532
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

Speech constitutes fundamentally adaptive behavior, i.e. speakers start compensating within about 150ms to disturbances in their ongoing articulation, induced, for example, by experimental manipulations of the auditory feedback they receive in real time. Moreover, after only a few minutes of exposure to a consistent perturbation speakers start to update their stored sensorimotor representations so that changes in articulation are observed even when normal feedback is restored. The way speakers monitor their ongoing articulation has been extensively studied for spatial properties of articulation (i.e. they hear a different vowel from the one they intend to produce). However, speech exhibits structure in time as well as space; yet, very little is known about how the former aspect is monitored in ongoing speech. This project thus analyzed responses to temporal auditory feedback perturbation; typically, within a multisyllable utterance one sound was stretched and the following sound compressed in realtime. Interest focused firstly on how systematic variation of the location of the perturbation with respect to phonetic and linguistic properties of the utterance can modulate online monitoring and adaptive behavior. Secondly, participants with a wide range of sensorimotor abilities were recruited, including people who stutter, and musicians. All participants completed a test battery of general sensorimotor abilities. Thirdly, we have started to compare responses to perturbation of both speech and music production. The main results to date include the following: (1) stronger responses to perturbation in syllable onset vs. syllable coda, indicating a greater malleability of the coda position; (2) stronger (and also a qualitatively different pattern of) responses in stressed vs. unstressed syllables; (3) no evidence for stronger responses when the perturbation results in a change of lexical identity; (4) preliminary evidence that persons who stutter may differ from controls in how syllable location affects online processing; evidence that responses to perturbation at different syllable locations depend in different ways on the sensorimotor abilities of the participants (perception more relevant in onset position, motor stability more relevant in coda position); (6) in the music tasks (involving a short multisyllabic sung phrase) there was a surprisingly weak response to (temporal) perturbation of the rhythmic structure, but clear compensation across the whole phrase to pitch perturbation. As the longer-term goal, we now aim to integrate these individual results into an overall understanding of adaptive behavior at the intersection of perceptual sensitivity, motor stability and internal models of self-generated error.

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