The Role of Auditory Feedback at Vocalization Onset and Mid-Utterance

Abstract

Auditory feedback plays an important role in monitoring and correcting for errors during speech production. Previous research suggests that at vocalization onset, auditory feedback is compared to a sensory prediction generated by the motor system to ensure the desired fundamental frequency (F0) is produced. After vocalization onset, auditory feedback is compared to the most recently perceived F0 in order to stabilize the vocalization. This study aimed to further investigate whether after vocalization onset, auditory feedback is used strictly to stabilize speakers’ F0, or if it is also influenced by the sensory prediction generated by the motor system. Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded while participants produced vocalizations and heard the F0 of their auditory feedback perturbed suddenly mid-utterance by half a semitone. For half of the vocalizations, at vocalization onset, participants’ F0 was also raised by half a semitone. Thus, half of the perturbations occurred while participants heard their unaltered auditory feedback, and the other half occurred in auditory feedback that had also been perturbed 50 cents at vocalization onset. If after vocalization onset auditory feedback is strictly used to stabilize speakers’ F0, then similarly sized vocal and ERP responses would be expected across all trials, regardless of whether the perturbation occurred while listening to altered or unaltered auditory feedback. Results indicate that the perturbations to the participants’ unaltered auditory feedback resulted in larger vocal and N1 and P2 ERP responses than perturbations to their altered auditory feedback. These results suggest that after vocalization onset auditory feedback is not strictly used to stabilize speakers’ F0, but is also used to ensure the desired F0 is produced.

Relationships between vocal pitch perception and production: a developmental perspective

“…The current work examined the vocal response to sustained pitch-shifts, analyzing specifically the first 20-120 ms after vocal onset. The initial tens of milliseconds of the vocal response are likely to provide information on the stored motor program 25,32 , as the weighting of forward control is high during this period in which auditory feedback control is not fast enough to detect and correct for altered auditory feedback. Larger vocal response magnitudes to sustained pitch-shifts suggest that an individual is effectively using sensorimotor adaptation to update their stored motor plans in response to these sustained changes.…”

“…A trained experimenter examined the f o contour in a custom-made MATLAB graphical user interface and selected the voice onset time for each trial; the median f o value between 20-120 ms after voice onset was subsequently calculated. This early portion of the vocalization was selected, as it provides information on the vocalization driven by the forward control system, prior to incorporation of sensory feedback 25,32 . Average f o values were calculated for each condition's baseline phase, and each condition was converted into ST relative to its own average baseline using Eq.…”

“…Of note, the DIVA model is primarily designed for speech motor control, yet ample behavioral work suggests that similar control systems are involved in vocal motor control [e.g. [6][7][8][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] ]. According to DIVA, early vocalizations allow the auditory and somatosensory sensory feedback systems to learn the relationships between a given motor command and the sensory feedback stemming from the resultant vocalization.…”

Deficits in monitoring self-produced speech in Parkinson’s disease

“…This finding does not indicate that PD patients do not have altered SIS, because when auditory feedback is perturbed in the middle of sustained phonation, no SIS is observed, but studies instead report an amplified P2 wave (Behroozmand et al 2009Chang et al 2013). The amplified P2 is assumed to reflect a different process than SIS: whereas SIS represents suppression of initial auditory activation that matches the predictions, the amplification of P2 reflects corrections to vocal output (Hawco and Jones 2009;Scheerer and Jones 2018).…”

Identification of a novel heterozygous mutation in the MITF gene in an Iranian family with Waardenburg syndrome type II using next‐generation sequencing

“…Waardenburg syndrome (WS) is an autosomal dominantly inherited disease characterized by different degrees of sensorineural hearing loss as well as hair, skin, and eye abnormal pigmentation. [1][2][3] WS affects an estimated 1 in 40,000 individuals, including two to five percent of all congenital hearing loss cases, 4,5 and is divided into four types from WS1 to WS4. WS is caused during embryonic development with mutations in several genes in neural crest cells, which have a role in division and migration.…”