Assessing Ecologically Valid Methods of Auditory Feedback Measurement in Individuals With Typical Speech

Abstract

Purpose: Auditory feedback is thought to contribute to the online control of speech production. Yet, the standard method of estimating auditory feedback control (i.e., reflexive responses to auditory–motor perturbations), although sound, requires specialized instrumentation, meticulous calibration, unnatural tasks, and specific acoustic environments. The purpose of this study was to explore more ecologically valid features of speech production to determine their relationships with auditory feedback mechanisms. Method: Two previously proposed measures of within-utterance variability (centering and baseline variability) were compared with reflexive response magnitudes in 30 adults with typical speech. These three measures were estimated for both the laryngeal and articulatory subsystems of speech. Results: Regardless of the speech subsystem, neither centering nor baseline variability was shown to be related to reflexive response magnitudes. Likewise, no relationships were found between centering and baseline variability. Conclusions: Despite previous suggestions that centering and baseline variability may be related to auditory feedback mechanisms, this study did not support these assertions. However, the detection of such relationships may have required a larger degree of variability in responses, relative to that found in those with typical speech. Future research on these relationships is warranted in populations with more heterogeneous responses, such as children or clinical populations. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.17330546

Abstracts of the 8th International Conference on Speech Motor Control Groningen, August 2022

“…In the last decade, several studies have reported on a speech phenomenon called centering, wherein the formants (F1 and F2) of a speaker's vowel production, which deviate from the median at utterance onset, move closer the median as production of the vowel progresses (Niziolek et al, 2013;Tomassi et al, 2022). This within-utterance formant movement of centering was thought to be at least partly driven by auditory feedback, since centering was correlated with speaking-induced suppression, a measure of auditory feedback processing during speaking (Niziolek et al, 2013).…”