Quick speech motor correction in the absence of auditory feedback.

A quick correction mechanism of the tongue has been formerly experimentally observed in speech posture stabilization in response to a sudden tongue stretch perturbation. Given its relatively short latency (< 150 ms), the response could be driven by somatosensory feedback alone. The current study assessed this hypothesis by examining whether this response is induced in the absence of auditory feedback.

Rhythmic tapping difficulties in adults who stutter: A deficit in beat perception, motor execution, or sensorimotor integration?

Objectives: The study aims to better understand the rhythmic abilities of people who stutter and to identify which processes potentially are impaired in this population: (1) beat perception and reproduction; (2) the execution of movements, in particular their initiation; (3) sensorimotor integration.

Material And Method: Finger tapping behavior of 16 adults who stutter (PWS) was compared with that of 16 matching controls (PNS) in five rhythmic tasks of various complexity: three synchronization tasks - a simple 1:1 isochronous pattern, a complex non-isochronous pattern, and a 4 tap:1 beat isochronous pattern -, a reaction task to an aperiodic and unpredictable pattern, and a reproduction task of an isochronous pattern after passively listening.

Results: PWS were able to reproduce an isochronous pattern on their own, without external auditory stimuli, with similar accuracy as PNS, but with increased variability.

Vocal drum sounds in human beatboxing: An acoustic and articulatory exploration using electromagnetic articulography.

Acoustic characteristics, lingual and labial articulatory dynamics, and ventilatory behaviors were studied on a beatboxer producing twelve drum sounds belonging to five main categories of his repertoire (kick, snare, hi-hat, rimshot, cymbal). Various types of experimental data were collected synchronously (respiratory inductance plethysmography, electroglottography, electromagnetic articulography, and acoustic recording). Automatic unsupervised classification was successfully applied on acoustic data with t-SNE spectral clustering technique.

Speakers are able to categorize vowels based on tongue somatosensation.

Auditory speech perception enables listeners to access phonological categories from speech sounds. During speech production and speech motor learning, speakers' experience matched auditory and somatosensory input. Accordingly, access to phonetic units might also be provided by somatosensory information.

The Time Course of Audio-Visual Phoneme Identification: a High Temporal Resolution Study.

Speech unfolds in time and, as a consequence, its perception requires temporal integration. Yet, studies addressing audio-visual speech processing have often overlooked this temporal aspect. Here, we address the temporal course of audio-visual speech processing in a phoneme identification task using a Gating paradigm.

A Comparative Study of the Precision of Carstens and Northern Digital Instruments Electromagnetic Articulographs.

Purpose: This study compares the precision of the electromagnetic articulographs used in speech research: Northern Digital Instruments' Wave and Carstens' AG200, AG500, and AG501 systems.

Method: The fluctuation of distances between 3 pairs of sensors attached to a manually rotated device that can position them inside the measurement volumes was determined. For each device, 2 precision estimates made on the basis of the 95% quantile range of these distances (QR95) were defined: The local QR95 was computed for bins around specific rotation angles, and the global QR95 was computed for all angles pooled.

Real-Time Control of an Articulatory-Based Speech Synthesizer for Brain Computer Interfaces.

Restoring natural speech in paralyzed and aphasic people could be achieved using a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) controlling a speech synthesizer in real-time. To reach this goal, a prerequisite is to develop a speech synthesizer producing intelligible speech in real-time with a reasonable number of control parameters. We present here an articulatory-based speech synthesizer that can be controlled in real-time for future BCI applications.

Bilingualism affects audiovisual phoneme identification.

We all go through a process of perceptual narrowing for phoneme identification. As we become experts in the languages we hear in our environment we lose the ability to identify phonemes that do not exist in our native phonological inventory. This research examined how linguistic experience-i.

Interaction between articulatory gestures and inner speech in a counting task.

Interaction between covert and overt orofacial gestures has been poorly studied apart from old and rather qualitative experiments. The question deserves special interest in the context of the debate between auditory and motor theories of speech perception, where dual tasks may be of great interest. It is shown here that dynamic mandible and lips movement produced by a participant result in strong and stable perturbations to an inner speech counting task that has to be realized at the same time, while static orofacial configurations and static or dynamic manual actions produce no perturbation.

No, there is no 150 ms lead of visual speech on auditory speech, but a range of audiovisual asynchronies varying from small audio lead to large audio lag.

An increasing number of neuroscience papers capitalize on the assumption published in this journal that visual speech would be typically 150 ms ahead of auditory speech. It happens that the estimation of audiovisual asynchrony in the reference paper is valid only in very specific cases, for isolated consonant-vowel syllables or at the beginning of a speech utterance, in what we call "preparatory gestures". However, when syllables are chained in sequences, as they are typically in most parts of a natural speech utterance, asynchrony should be defined in a different way.

Speech production after glossectomy: methodological aspects.

This article focuses on methodological issues related to quantitative assessments of speech quality after glossectomy. Acoustic and articulatory data were collected for 8 consonants from two patients. The acoustic analysis is based on spectral moments and the Klatt VOT.

A study of lip movements during spontaneous dialog and its application to voice activity detection.

This paper presents a quantitative and comprehensive study of the lip movements of a given speaker in different speech/nonspeech contexts, with a particular focus on silences (i.e., when no sound is produced by the speaker).

Compensation strategies for a lip-tube perturbation of French [u]: an acoustic and perceptual study of 4-year-old children.

The relations between production and perception in 4-year-old children were examined in a study of compensation strategies for a lip-tube perturbation. Acoustic and perceptual analyses of the rounded vowel [u] produced by twelve 4-year-old French speakers were conducted under two conditions: normal and with a 15-mm-diam tube inserted between the lips. Recordings of isolated vowels were made in the normal condition before any perturbation (N1), immediately upon insertion of the tube and for the next 19 trials in this perturbed condition, with (P2) or without articulatory instructions (P1), and in the normal condition after the perturbed trials (N2).

Seeing to hear better: evidence for early audio-visual interactions in speech identification.

Lip reading is the ability to partially understand speech by looking at the speaker's lips. It improves the intelligibility of speech in noise when audio-visual perception is compared with audio-only perception. A recent set of experiments showed that seeing the speaker's lips also enhances sensitivity to acoustic information, decreasing the auditory detection threshold of speech embedded in noise [J.