Temporal auditory feedback perturbation – advantages and limits
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Perturbations of speakers' own auditory feedback study the interaction of feedback and feedforward systems in speech. Mainly applied to spectral features of speech, a more recent approach allows for temporal shifts in almost real-time. Our group investigates how speech timing is controlled and established via auditory feedback. We present three temporal perturbation studies targeting the control of prosodic and lexical timing. The first study examines the temporal coordination of syllable structure when onset, nucleus, and coda are perturbed. We found timing structures to be monitored and updated via auditory feedback but with dependence on articulatory stability. The second study focuses on realizing lexical stress when the stress pattern is attenuated by shortening the vowel in a stressed syllable compared to vowel shortening in an unstressed syllable. Speakers reacted to both perturbed syllables but to a greater extent when perturbation weakened the stress pattern. The third experiment tests for lexical effects: In a monosyllabic word pair differing in nucleus quantity only, the nucleus duration is altered towards the other word. Analyses and results will be presented at the conference. The presentation aims at discussing the capabilities and limits of the temporal auditory feedback perturbation paradigm and its enhancement for future studies.