Investigating the influence of local and personal common ground on memory for conversation using an online referential communication task.

To maintain efficiency during conversation, interlocutors form and retrieve memory representations for the shared understanding or common ground that they have with their partner. Here, an online referential communication task (RCT) was used in two experiments to examine whether the strength and type of common ground between dyads influence their ability to form and recall referential labels for images. Results from both experiments show a significant association between the strength of common ground formed between dyads for images during the RCT and their verbatim-but not semantic-recall memory for image descriptions about a week later.

Perturbing the consistency of auditory feedback in speech.

Sensory information, including auditory feedback, is used by talkers to maintain fluent speech articulation. Current models of speech motor control posit that speakers continually adjust their motor commands based on discrepancies between the sensory predictions made by a forward model and the sensory consequences of their speech movements. Here, in two within-subject design experiments, we used a real-time formant manipulation system to explore how reliant speech articulation is on the accuracy or predictability of auditory feedback information.

Individual variability in auditory feedback processing: Responses to real-time formant perturbations and their relation to perceptual acuity.

In this study, both between-subject and within-subject variability in speech perception and speech production were examined in the same set of speakers. Perceptual acuity was determined using an ABX auditory discrimination task, whereby speakers made judgments between pairs of syllables on a /ɛ/ to /æ/ acoustic continuum. Auditory feedback perturbations of the first two formants were implemented in a production task to obtain measures of compensation, normal speech production variability, and vowel spacing.

Forty Years After Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices: the McGurk Effect Revisited.

Since its discovery 40 years ago, the McGurk illusion has been usually cited as a prototypical paradigmatic case of multisensory binding in humans, and has been extensively used in speech perception studies as a proxy measure for audiovisual integration mechanisms. Despite the well-established practice of using the McGurk illusion as a tool for studying the mechanisms underlying audiovisual speech integration, the magnitude of the illusion varies enormously across studies. Furthermore, the processing of McGurk stimuli differs from congruent audiovisual processing at both phenomenological and neural levels.

The score distribution and factor structure of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences-Positive Scale (CAPE-P15) in a Canadian sample.

Aim: Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) share several risk factors with psychotic disorders and confer greater risk of developing a psychotic disorder. Thus, individuals with PLEs not only comprise a valuable population in which to study the aetiology and premorbid changes associated with psychosis, but also represent a high-risk population that could benefit from clinical monitoring or early intervention efforts.

Method: We examined the score distribution and factor structure of the current 15-item Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences-Positive Scale (CAPE-P15) in a Canadian sample.

Linguistic initiation signals increase auditory feedback error correction.

Previous research has shown that speakers can adapt their speech in a flexible manner as a function of a variety of contextual and task factors. While it is known that speech tasks may play a role in speech motor behavior, it remains to be explored if the manner in which the speaking action is initiated can modify low-level, automatic control of vocal motor action. In this study, the nature (linguistic vs non-linguistic) and modality (auditory vs visual) of the go signal (i.

Modulation of auditory-motor learning in response to formant perturbation as a function of delayed auditory feedback.

The interaction of language production and perception has been substantiated by empirical studies where speakers compensate their speech articulation in response to the manipulated sound of their voice heard in real-time as auditory feedback. A recent study by Max and Maffett [(2015). Neurosci.

Spatial Frequency Requirements and Gaze Strategy in Visual-Only and Audiovisual Speech Perception.

Purpose: The aim of this article is to examine the effects of visual image degradation on performance and gaze behavior in audiovisual and visual-only speech perception tasks.

Method: We presented vowel-consonant-vowel utterances visually filtered at a range of frequencies in visual-only, audiovisual congruent, and audiovisual incongruent conditions (Experiment 1; N = 66). In Experiment 2 (N = 20), participants performed a visual-only speech perception task and in Experiment 3 (N = 20) an audiovisual task while having their gaze behavior monitored using eye-tracking equipment.

High visual resolution matters in audiovisual speech perception, but only for some.

The basis for individual differences in the degree to which visual speech input enhances comprehension of acoustically degraded speech is largely unknown. Previous research indicates that fine facial detail is not critical for visual enhancement when auditory information is available; however, these studies did not examine individual differences in ability to make use of fine facial detail in relation to audiovisual speech perception ability. Here, we compare participants based on their ability to benefit from visual speech information in the presence of an auditory signal degraded with noise, modulating the resolution of the visual signal through low-pass spatial frequency filtering and monitoring gaze behavior.

Formant compensation for auditory feedback with English vowels.

Past studies have shown that speakers spontaneously adjust their speech acoustics in response to their auditory feedback perturbed in real time. In the case of formant perturbation, the majority of studies have examined speaker's compensatory production using the English vowel /ɛ/ as in the word "head." Consistent behavioral observations have been reported, and there is lively discussion as to how the production system integrates auditory versus somatosensory feedback to control vowel production.

Temporal control and compensation for perturbed voicing feedback.

Previous research employing a real-time auditory perturbation paradigm has shown that talkers monitor their own speech attributes such as fundamental frequency, vowel intensity, vowel formants, and fricative noise as part of speech motor control. In the case of vowel formants or fricative noise, what was manipulated is spectral information about the filter function of the vocal tract. However, segments can be contrasted by parameters other than spectral configuration.

The art of gaze guidance.

An ongoing challenge in scene perception is identifying the factors that influence how we explore our visual world. By using multiple versions of paintings as a tool to control for high-level influences, we show that variation in the visual details of a painting causes differences in observers' gaze despite constant task and content. Further, we show that by switching locations of highly salient regions through textural manipulation, a corresponding switch in eye movement patterns is observed.

Language dependent vowel representation in speech production.

The representation of speech goals was explored using an auditory feedback paradigm. When talkers produce vowels the formant structure of which is perturbed in real time, they compensate to preserve the intended goal. When vowel formants are shifted up or down in frequency, participants change the formant frequencies in the opposite direction to the feedback perturbation.

Multivoxel patterns reveal functionally differentiated networks underlying auditory feedback processing of speech.

The everyday act of speaking involves the complex processes of speech motor control. An important component of control is monitoring, detection, and processing of errors when auditory feedback does not correspond to the intended motor gesture. Here we show, using fMRI and converging operations within a multivoxel pattern analysis framework, that this sensorimotor process is supported by functionally differentiated brain networks.

Detection of audiovisual speech correspondences without visual awareness.

Mounting physiological and behavioral evidence has shown that the detectability of a visual stimulus can be enhanced by a simultaneously presented sound. The mechanisms underlying these cross-sensory effects, however, remain largely unknown. Using continuous flash suppression (CFS), we rendered a complex, dynamic visual stimulus (i.

The effect of a concurrent working memory task and temporal offsets on the integration of auditory and visual speech information.

Audiovisual speech perception is an everyday occurrence of multisensory integration. Conflicting visual speech information can influence the perception of acoustic speech (namely the McGurk effect), and auditory and visual speech are integrated over a rather wide range of temporal offsets. This research examined whether the addition of a concurrent cognitive load task would affect the audiovisual integration in a McGurk speech task and whether the cognitive load task would cause more interference at increasing offsets.

The influence of selective attention to auditory and visual speech on the integration of audiovisual speech information.

Conflicting visual speech information can influence the perception of acoustic speech, causing an illusory percept of a sound not present in the actual acoustic speech (the McGurk effect). We examined whether participants can voluntarily selectively attend to either the auditory or visual modality by instructing participants to pay attention to the information in one modality and to ignore competing information from the other modality. We also examined how performance under these instructions was affected by weakening the influence of the visual information by manipulating the temporal offset between the audio and video channels (experiment 1), and the spatial frequency information present in the video (experiment 2).

Children's development of self-regulation in speech production.

Species-specific vocalizations fall into two broad categories: those that emerge during maturation, independent of experience, and those that depend on early life interactions with conspecifics. Human language and the communication systems of a small number of other species, including songbirds, fall into this latter class of vocal learning. Self-monitoring has been assumed to play an important role in the vocal learning of speech and studies demonstrate that perception of your own voice is crucial for both the development and lifelong maintenance of vocalizations in humans and songbirds.

A cross-language study of compensation in response to real-time formant perturbation.

Past studies have shown that when formants are perturbed in real time, speakers spontaneously compensate for the perturbation by changing their formant frequencies in the opposite direction to the perturbation. Further, the pattern of these results suggests that the processing of auditory feedback error operates at a purely acoustic level. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the response of three language groups to real-time formant perturbations, (1) native English speakers producing an English vowel /ε/, (2) native Japanese speakers producing a Japanese vowel (/e([inverted perpendicular])/), and (3) native Japanese speakers learning English, producing /ε/.

Probing the independence of formant control using altered auditory feedback.

Two auditory feedback perturbation experiments were conducted to examine the nature of control of the first two formants in vowels. In the first experiment, talkers heard their auditory feedback with either F1 or F2 shifted in frequency. Talkers altered production of the perturbed formant by changing its frequency in the opposite direction to the perturbation but did not produce a correlated alteration of the unperturbed formant.

Compensations in response to real-time formant perturbations of different magnitudes.

Previous auditory perturbation studies have demonstrated that talkers spontaneously compensate for real-time formant-shifts by altering formant production in a manner opposite to the perturbation. Here, two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of amplitude of perturbation on the compensatory behavior for the vowel /epsilon/. In the first experiment, 20 male talkers received three step-changes in acoustic feedback: F1 was increased by 50, 100, and 200 Hz, while F2 was simultaneously decreased by 75, 125, and 250 Hz.

Functional overlap between regions involved in speech perception and in monitoring one's own voice during speech production.

The fluency and the reliability of speech production suggest a mechanism that links motor commands and sensory feedback. Here, we examined the neural organization supporting such links by using fMRI to identify regions in which activity during speech production is modulated according to whether auditory feedback matches the predicted outcome or not and by examining the overlap with the network recruited during passive listening to speech sounds. We used real-time signal processing to compare brain activity when participants whispered a consonant-vowel-consonant word ("Ted") and either heard this clearly or heard voice-gated masking noise.

Reducing inter-subject anatomical variation: effect of normalization method on sensitivity of functional magnetic resonance imaging data analysis in auditory cortex and the superior temporal region.

Conventional group analysis of functional MRI (fMRI) data usually involves spatial alignment of anatomy across participants by registering every brain image to an anatomical reference image. Due to the high degree of inter-subject anatomical variability, a low-resolution average anatomical model is typically used as the target template, and/or smoothing kernels are applied to the fMRI data to increase the overlap among subjects' image data. However, such smoothing can make it difficult to resolve small regions such as subregions of auditory cortex when anatomical morphology varies among subjects.

Analysis of facial motion patterns during speech using a matrix factorization algorithm.

This paper presents an analysis of facial motion during speech to identify linearly independent kinematic regions. The data consists of three-dimensional displacement records of a set of markers located on a subject's face while producing speech. A QR factorization with column pivoting algorithm selects a subset of markers with independent motion patterns.