Online monitoring of auditory feedback is sensitive to language experience.

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that vocal responses to pitch perturbations vary as a function of stimulus parameter and can be modulated according to the specific demands of vocal task. The purpose of this cross-language study was to examine whether the online monitoring of auditory feedback is sensitive to language experience during vowel phonation. Native speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin participated in the experiments. They were asked to vocalize a vowel sound /u/ at their conversational pitch, during which their voice pitch feedback was unexpectedly shifted (±50, ±100, ±200, or ±500 cents, 200 ms duration) and fed back to them over headphones. The results showed that, as compared to previous findings in English speakers [Chen et al. (2007)], both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers produced smaller but faster responses to pitch perturbations. In addition, Mandarin speakers produced larger response magnitudes than Cantonese speakers, and the modulation of response magnitudes as a function of stimulus magnitude was observed in Cantonese but not in Mandarin speakers. These findings demonstrate that voice F0 control is language dependent. Further, the different patterns of vocal responses between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers indicate that this highly automatic feedback mechanism works within the specific tonal system of each language.