What auditory feedback can teach us about the perception-production link in speech

Speaking is an incredibly complex skill, requiring the quick and very precise coordination of various muscles spread across the vocal tract. As most complex motor skills, speech production requires continuous sensorimotor integration. One of the clearest cases is the use of perceptual feedback during speech production. In this talk, I will present two studies that investigated the use of auditory feedback during speech production. Both studies employ a technique called “altered auditory feedback”, where speakers’ auditory feedback is manipulated in real time in order to examine speakers’ responses to unexpected auditory consequences. First, we investigated how the recent history of feedback errors affects the feedback-related response. The results suggest that speakers will assign more weight to auditory feedback when the prediction error is consistent, compared to when it is random. Second, we investigate whether perceptual learning affects speech learning. We show that after a period of visually-guided recalibration of a phoneme boundary, speakers did not change responses to unexpected auditory feedback accordingly. Therefore, speech perception shows flexibility that does not always translate to speech production. Both studies suggest a complex interaction between speech perception and production, where the influence of perceptual information on subsequent production may be gated by the contextual relevance