Speech Production and Perception

Abstract

One way to investigate speech motor learning is to create artificial adaptation situations by perturbing speakers' auditory feedback in real time. Formant perturbations were introduced by Houde and Jordan (1998), providing the first evidence that speakers adapt their pronunciation to compensate for these perturbations. Twenty years later, this chapter provides an overview of the general impact of Houde and Jordan's work in speech research and beyond, as well as a more detailed review of studies that involve formant perturbations. The impact of Houde and Jordan's work appears to be cross-disciplinary. Although mainly related to speech production and perception, it has also been cited in the limb movement and even animal research, mainly as evidence of adaptive sensorimotor control. Formant perturbations research has expanded rapidly since 2006, spreading across the world and many research teams. We identified 77 experimental studies focused on formant perturbations which we then analyzed with regard to technical and theoretical issues. This analysis showed that various apparatuses and procedures were used to address important topics of speech research. A primary interest has been in feedback and feedforward control mechanisms in speech. These mechanisms were addressed in different populations, including adults and children with typical vs. atypical development, with behavioral or neurophysiological approaches, or both. Some formant perturbations studies more specifically focused on the integration of auditory and somatosensory feedback in speech production, while others explored the interaction between speech production and perception of phonemic contrasts. Some research questioned the processes and the nature of speech representations by investigating generalization of adaptation to formant perturbations. Finally, a few studies were interested in the effect of extraneous variables such as surface effects or speakers' general cognitive abilities. Altogether, these studies provide insights into speech motor control in general and into the understanding of sensorimotor interactions in particular. The field has developed recently and may still expand in the future, as it allows us to address fundamental topics in speech research such as perception-production links or abstract vs. exemplar representations. Future Caudrelier and Rochet-Capellan research with formant perturbations may also further connect sensorimotor adaptation to linguistic and cognitive factors and in particular to working and long-term memory.

Retrieving Tract Variables From Acoustics: A Comparison of Different Machine Learning Strategies

“…However, coarticulation can be better understood as a property that occurs from a sequence of overlapping discrete actions in the human vocal tract [38]. Articulatory phonology [5], [6], [98] treats the variability in speech (specifically coarticulation) from the speech production point of view, using speech gestures [73] as primitive speech production units.…”

Language as a Values‐realizing Activity: Caring, Acting, and Perceiving

“…Psychologists and linguists are little different. Most studies of language, both psychological and linguistic, focus on small scales—the phoneme, the sentence, turn‐taking, speech acts (e.g., Fowler ). Even at larger scales of analysis the temptation is to cut language down to a manageable size.…”

Neurophysiological Correlates of Asymmetries in Vowel Perception: An English-French Cross-Linguistic Event-Related Potential Study

“…A central goal of research in the field of speech perception is to explicate how listeners map the input acoustic signal onto the phonetic categories of language (for reviews, Cleary and Pisoni, 2001 ; Fowler, 2003 ; Diehl et al, 2004 ; Samuel, 2011 ). Within this overarching agenda, developmentalists have addressed how this mapping between acoustic and phonetic structures dynamically changes via early language experience in the first year of life ( Werker and Curtin, 2005 ; Kuhl et al, 2008 ; Best et al, 2016 ).…”