Title: Speakers can simultaneously adapt speech to counteract opposing auditory perturbations of the same vowel within a single word
Legend: Speakers were presented with different auditory perturbations to both vowels in the word “bedhead” (left panel); one vowel was altered toward the vowel /æ/ (“had”) and the other toward /ɪ/ (“hid”), with the order balanced across participants. As a group, speakers produced a robust adaptive response in both vowels that counteracted the applied perturbations (middle), leading to robust differences in vowel formants between phonemically identical vowels. While there was some variability at the individual level (right), this group pattern was observed in a number of individual speakers. These results suggest that speech motor learning is tied to specific speech behaviors rather than being related to global internal models relating speech articulation and acoustics. [unpublished data]
About the Lab: The Speech Motor Action + Control Lab investigates the human capacity to produce speech using behavioral, computation, and neurological methods. Our current projects focus on the role of the cerebellum in speech motor control and speech disorders associated with cerebellar damage by using computational models to understand the architecture of the speech motor system and investigating how speech motor control is updated and altered through various types of learning.