Divided Attention Has Limited Effects on Speech Sensorimotor Control.

Purpose: When vowel formants are externally perturbed, speakers change their production to oppose that perturbation both during the ongoing production (compensation) and in future productions (adaptation). To date, attempts to explain the large variability across individuals in these responses have focused on trait-based characteristics such as auditory acuity, but evidence from other motor domains suggests that attention may modulate the motor response to sensory perturbations. Here, we test the extent to which divided attention impacts sensorimotor control for supralaryngeal articulation.

Audiomotor prediction errors drive speech adaptation even in the absence of overt movement.

Observed outcomes of our movements sometimes differ from our expectations. These sensory prediction errors recalibrate the brain's internal models for motor control, reflected in alterations to subsequent movements that counteract these errors (motor adaptation). While leading theories suggest that all forms of motor adaptation are driven by learning from sensory prediction errors, dominant models of speech adaptation argue that adaptation results from integrating time-advanced copies of corrective feedback commands into feedforward motor programs.

Auditory Feedback Is Used for Adaptation and Compensation in Speech Timing.

Purpose Real-time altered feedback has demonstrated a key role for auditory feedback in both online feedback control and in updating feedforward control for future utterances. The aim of this study was to examine adaptation in response to temporal perturbation using real-time perturbation of ongoing speech. Method Twenty native English speakers with no reported history of speech or hearing disorders participated in this study.