Auditory feedback control of vocal intensity during speech and sustained-vowel production

Abstract

Vocal intensity is an important speech component for communicative effectiveness, such as speaking above ambient noise in a loud restaurant, and also for communicative appropriateness, such as speaking quietly in a library. Speakers adjust their vocal intensity using information from their auditory feedback of how loud they perceive their speech. In this study, we were interested in the control of auditory feedback for vocal intensity. Participants repeatedly produced both a simple, sustained-vowel (i.e., “ahhh”) and a short target phrase (i.e., “You know Nina?”) while their voice auditory feedback was briefly perturbed up or down in loudness. We then measured their reflexive intensity response produced quickly after the perturbation to correct for the unexpected change in loudness. In a similar study on pitch perturbations, speakers produced larger reflexive pitch responses as a function of perturbation magnitude in phrase production but did not produce this differential pattern in sustained vowel production (Chen et al., 2007). This result suggests that auditory feedback is more sensitive to changes in suprasegmental features of speech when produced with linguistic intent. In our current study, we are interested in whether this same pattern will be observed for control of vocal intensity.