Compensations to auditory feedback perturbations in congenitally blind and sighted speakers: Acoustic and articulatory data

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of visual deprivation on the relationship between speech perception and production by examining compensatory responses to real-time perturbations in auditory feedback. Specifically, acoustic and articulatory data were recorded while sighted and congenitally blind French speakers produced several repetitions of the vowel /ø/. At the acoustic level, blind speakers produced larger compensatory responses to altered vowels than their sighted peers. At the articulatory level, blind speakers also produced larger displacements of the upper lip, the tongue tip, and the tongue dorsum in compensatory responses. These findings suggest that blind speakers tolerate less discrepancy between actual and expected auditory feedback than sighted speakers. The study also suggests that sighted speakers have acquired more constrained somatosensory goals through the influence of visual cues perceived in face-to-face conversation, leading them to tolerate less discrepancy between expected and altered articulatory positions compared to blind speakers and thus resulting in smaller observed compensatory responses.

Maintaining Distinctiveness at Increased Speaking Rates: A Comparison between Congenitally Blind and Sighted Speakers

“…In contrast, since perceptual saliency does not involve visual distinctiveness for them, blind speakers would have safeguarded auditory goals more than their sighted peers, thus producing vowels within the appropriate auditory regions of the language. These results can be related to those obtained in a different study in which compensatory abilities to auditory perturbation were investigated in blind and sighted speakers [4,25]. In the latter study, participants were asked to produce the vowel /ø/ while hearing a vowel in which F2 was altered towards /e/.…”

Auditory and Somatosensory Interaction in Speech Perception in Children and Adults

“…It showed that typically developing adults, whose somatosensory goals are narrowed by vision were more likely to tolerate large discrepancies between the expected and produced auditory outcome, whereas blind speakers, whose auditory goals had primacy over somatosensory ones, tolerated larger discrepancies between their expected and produced somatosensory feedback. In this sense, blind speakers were more inclined to adopt unusual articulatory positions to minimize divergences of their auditory goals (Trudeau-Fisette et al, 2017).…”

A review of data collection practices using electromagnetic articulography

“…Nevertheless, several studies have tested children from five years of age onwards (e.g., Katz & Bharadwaj, 2001;Cheng et al, 2007;Schötz et al, 2013), giving important insights into the development of individual articulators during the process of early speech acquisition. Articulographs have also frequently been used to study disordered speech in individuals suffering from various conditions that can impact speech production and/or speech motor control, ranging from speech disorders such as stuttering and cluttering (Didirkova & Hirsch, 2019;McClean, Tasko, & Runyan, 2004;Hartinger & Mooshammer, 2008) or apraxia or speech (e.g., Bartle-Meyer, Goozée, & Murdoch, 2009;Nijland, Maassen, Hulstijn, & Peters, 2004); hypokinetic dysarthria (e.g., Kearney et al, 2018;Mefferd & Dietrich, 2019) or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (e.g., Lee & Bell, 2018;Shellikeri et al, 2016) to congenital conditions such as cleft lip (e.g., van Lieshout, Rutjes, & Spauwen, 2002) or congenital blindness (e.g., Trudeau-Fisette, Tiede, & Ménard, 2017). Using EMA to study disordered speech (more studies can be found in the Appendix) is important to provide insight into the underlying issues of speech motor control that cannot be detected through acoustics only.…”