Abstract
It is well known that acoustic change in speech production is subject to age-related declines. How aging alters cortical sensorimotor integration in speech control, however, remains poorly understood. The present event-related potential study examined the behavioral and neural effects of aging and sex on the auditory-motor processing of voice pitch errors. Behaviorally, older adults produced significantly larger vocal compensations for pitch perturbations than young adults across the sexes, while the effects of sex on vocal compensation did not exist for both young and older adults. At the cortical level, there was a significant interaction between aging and sex on the N1-P2 complex. Older males produced significantly smaller P2 amplitudes than young males, while young males produced significantly larger N1 and P2 amplitudes than young females. In addition, females produced faster N1 responses than males regardless of age, while young adults produced faster P2 responses than older adults across the sexes. These findings provide the first neurobehavioral evidence that demonstrates the aging influence on auditory feedback control of speech production, and highlight the importance of sex in understanding the aging of the neuromotor control of speech production.
Highlights
Speech production is a remarkable motor behavior that involves precisely coordinated movements of multiple muscles and speech articulators, and relies on the integration of sensory feedback into the vocal motor systems (Smotherman, 2007)
One three-way RMANOVA conducted on the magnitudes of vocal compensations revealed a significant main effect of age [F(1,40) = 5.666, p = 0.022], showing that older adults (16.8 ± 6.8 cents) produced significantly larger vocal compensations than young adults (12.8 ± 4.2 cents)
The latencies of vocal compensations measured as the peak time of vocal response magnitude did not vary as a function of age [F(1,40) = 0.028, p = 0.867], sex [F(1,40) = 0.508, p = 0.480], and stimulus [F(1,40) = 0.169, p = 0.683]
Summary
Speech production is a remarkable motor behavior that involves precisely coordinated movements of multiple muscles and speech articulators, and relies on the integration of sensory feedback into the vocal motor systems (Smotherman, 2007). Aging and Speech Motor Control temporal gryus, basal ganglia, and thalamus) as well as frontoparietal regions (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule) (Tourville et al, 2008; Zarate and Zatorre, 2008; Tian and Poeppel, 2010; Parkinson et al, 2012; Chang et al, 2013; Behroozmand et al, 2015; Guo et al, 2016) These findings reflect the compensatory mechanisms by which errors in auditory feedback can be detected and corrected to stabilize the production of speech sounds around the desired acoustic targets (Hickok et al, 2011; Tian and Poeppel, 2015)
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