Investigation of interaction between speech perception and production using auditory feedback

Abstract

This study employed an auditory feedback paradigm with perturbed fed-back speech to investigate interaction between speech perception and production by measuring simultaneous fluctuations of speech production organs using the electromyographic (EMG) signals, articulatory movements, as well as spectral analyses, where the articulatory data were obtained by the electromagnetic articulographic (EMA) system. Chinese vowels pair [i]-[y] and Japanese vowels pairs [e]-[a], [e]-[i] and [e]-[u] were chosen as the experimental objects. When the speaker is maintaining the first vowel, the feedback sound is randomly changed from the first vowel to the second one in each pair by manipulating the first three formants. Spectral analysis showed that a clear compensation was seen in the first and second formants of the vowels. Analyses of EMG and EMA signals also showed muscle reactivation and tongue movements to compensate for the perturbations. Latency of the compensating response is about 150 ms to start and about 290 ms for maximum compensation from the onset of the perturbation. According to the measurements, it seems that in most cases the speaker attempts to compensate for the ‘‘error’’ caused by the auditory perturbation by a real-time monitoring, and the auditory feedback takes place simultaneously often during speech production.