The Role of Temporal Modulation in Sensorimotor Interaction.

Louis Goldstein

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02608

Abstract

How do we align the distinct neural patterns associated with the articulation and the acoustics of the same utterance in order to guide behaviors that demand sensorimotor interaction, such as vocal learning and the use of feedback during speech production? One hypothesis is that while the representations are distinct, their patterns of change over time (temporal modulation) are systematically related. This hypothesis is pursued in the exploratory study described here, using paired articulatory and acoustic data from the X-ray microbeam corpus. The results show that modulation in both articulatory movement and in the changing acoustics has the form of a pulse-like structure related to syllable structure. The pulses are aligned with each other in time, and the modulation functions are robustly correlated. These results encourage further investigation and testing of the hypothesis.

Highlights

Work over the last 20 years has revealed abundant evidence for real-time sensorimotor interaction in both speech production and speech perception
It is tempting to think that evidence for this common representation might be found in the neural activation patterns in the motor cortex like those that have been found during listening to speech (Wilson et al, 2004)
The MFCC modulation function exhibits a similar structure, it has more peaks than the MBEAM function. This is reasonable, as there is more information in the MFCCs than in the MBEAM and it is more fine-grained temporally: source changes and nasalization are not represented in the MBEAM data, and it is derived from measurements of the anterior tract only

Summary

Introduction

Work over the last 20 years has revealed abundant evidence for real-time sensorimotor interaction in both speech production and speech perception. Vocal learning requires the ability to use auditory information to guide changes in articulatory behavior. The existence of such sensorimotor interactions would appear to require that speakers have some common representation of speech articulation and acoustics that affords the kind of alignment that these experiment results exhibit. It is tempting to think that evidence for this common representation might be found in the neural activation patterns in the motor cortex like those that have been found during listening to speech (Wilson et al, 2004).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion