Specificity of speech sensori-motor learning

Amélie Rochet-Capellan (1) , David J Ostry (2)

1 Motor Control Lab
2 McGill University = Université McGill [Montréal, Canada]

The present study examines the specificity of sensori-motor learning in speech production by assessing speakers' abilities to correct for opposing acoustical changes to the first formant (F1) of the vowel in CVC words. The training utterances were composed either of different vowels in the same consonantal context (experiment 1: "had" shifted up; "head" shifted down or unshifted); or the same vowel in different consonantal contexts (experiment 2: "head" shifted up; "bed" shifted down and "ted" unshifted). The results show that, in the same training phase, the speakers compensate for the two opposite acoustical shifts independently by reliably modifying F1 in a direction opposite to the shift and F2 minus F1 in the same direction as the shift. This adaptation does not transfer to the unshifted word. These results support the hypothesis that sensori-motor learning in speech is local or instance-based. They also show that this specificity is applied to complete production units (in this case words) rather than the individually shifted sounds (in this case vowels).

Mots clés: Specificity of motor learning; Auditory-motor adaptation; Acoustical perturbation; Specificity of motor learning.

Domaines: Psychologie et comportements

Amélie Rochet-Capellan, David J Ostry. Specificity of speech sensori-motor learning. Motor Speech Conference, Mar 2010, Savannah, United States. ⟨hal-00960249⟩