Controlling Pitch for Prosody: Sensorimotor Adaptation in Linguistically Meaningful Contexts.

Purpose: This study examined how speakers adapt to fundamental frequency () errors that affect the use of prosody to convey linguistic meaning, whether adaptation in that context relates to adaptation in linguistically neutral sustained vowels, and whether cue trading is reflected in responses in the prosodic cues of and amplitude.

Method: Twenty-four speakers said vowels and sentences while was digitally altered to induce predictable errors. Shifts in (±200 cents) were applied to the entire sustained vowel and one word (emphasized or unemphasized) in sentences. Two prosodic cues- and amplitude-were extracted. The effects of shifts, shift direction, and emphasis on response magnitude were evaluated with repeated-measures analyses of variance. Relationships between adaptive responses in sentences and vowels and between adaptive and amplitude responses were evaluated with Spearman correlations.

Results: Speakers adapted to errors in both linguistically meaningful sentences and linguistically neutral vowels. Adaptive responses of unemphasized words were smaller than those of emphasized words when was shifted upward. There was no relationship between adaptive responses in vowels and emphasized words, but adaptive and amplitude responses were strongly, positively correlated.

Conclusions: Sensorimotor adaptation occurs in response to errors regardless of how disruptive the error is to linguistic meaning. Adaptation to errors during sustained vowels may not involve the exact same mechanisms as sensorimotor adaptation as it occurs in meaningful speech. The relationship between adaptive responses in and amplitude supports an integrated model of prosody.

Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25008908.