To date, several fMRI studies reveal activation in motor planning areas during musical auditory imagery. We addressed whether such activations may give rise to peripheral motor activity, termed subvocalization or covert singing, using surface electromyography. Sensors placed on extrinsic laryngeal muscles, facial muscles, and a control site on the bicep measured muscle activity during auditory imagery that preceded singing, as well as during the completion of a visual imagery task. Greater activation was found in laryngeal and lip muscles for auditory than for visual imagery tasks, whereas no differences across tasks were found for other sensors. Furthermore, less accurate singers exhibited greater laryngeal activity during auditory imagery than did more accurate singers. This suggests that subvocalization may be used as a strategy to facilitate auditory imagery, which appears to be degraded in inaccurate singers. Taken together, these results suggest that subvocalization may play a role in anticipatory auditory imagery, and possibly as a way of supplementing motor associations with auditory imagery.

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When singing a melody or producing sentences, we take for granted the fact that the sounds we create (auditory feedback) match the intended consequences of our actions. The importance of these perception/action matches to production is illustrated by the detrimental effects of altered auditory feedback (AAF). Previous research in the domain of music has shown that when AAF leads to asynchronies between perception and action, timing of production is disrupted but accuracy of sequencing is not. On the other hand, AAF manipulations of pitch disrupt sequencing but not timing. Such dissociative effects, as well as other findings, suggest that sensitivity to AAF may be based on hierarchical organization of sequences. In the current research we examined whether similar effects are found for the production of speech, for which syllables rather than pitches may constitute content units. In the first experiment, participants either sang melodies or spoke sequences of nonsense syllables. In the second experiment, the tasks were combined such that participants sang syllable sequences. Production in both experiments was accompanied by either normal, asynchronous, or content altered auditory feedback. Across experiments, effects of AAF on the accuracy of sequencing were similar in speaking and singing tasks, and in all cases reflected the dissociative effects described earlier. For timing of production, however, previous results were only found when participants sang sequences that did not have varying syllabic content. These results suggest that sensitivity to timing exists at multiple hierarchical levels, particularly at the syllable and phonetic levels.

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Vocal imitation plays a critical function in the development and use of both language and music. Previous studies have reported more accurate imitation for sung pitch than spoken pitch, which might be attributed to the structural differences in acoustic signals and/or the distinct mental representations of pitch patterns across speech and music. The current study investigates the interaction between bottom-up (i.e., acoustic structure) and top-down (i.e., participants' language and musical background) factors on pitch imitation by comparing speech and song imitation accuracy across four groups: English and Mandarin speakers with or without musical training. Participants imitated pitch sequences that were characteristic of either song or speech, derived from pitch patterns in English and Mandarin spoken sentences. Overall, song imitation was more accurate than speech imitation, and this advantage was larger for English than Mandarin pitch sequences, regardless of participants' musical and language experiences. This effect likely reflects the perceptual salience of linguistic tones in Mandarin relative to English speech. Music and language knowledge were associated with optimal imitation of different acoustic features. Musicians were more accurate in matching absolute pitch across syllables and musical notes compared to nonmusicians. By contrast, Mandarin speakers were more accurate at imitating fine-grained changes within and across pitch events compared to English speakers. These results suggest that different top-down factors (i.e., language and musical background) influence pitch imitation ability for different dimensions of bottom-up features (i.e., absolute pitch and relative pitch patterns). Public Significance StatementResults of this study revealed that pitch imitation ability is influenced by one's language and musical background as well as the characteristics of acoustic stimuli. Musical training may improve the ability to match absolute pitch whereas experience with a tone language may enhance the ability to imitate relative pitch.