scholarly journals Exposure to Auditory Feedback Delay while Speaking Induces Perceptual Habituation but does not Mitigate the Disruptive Effect of Delay on Speech Auditory-motor Learning

Neuroscience ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 446 ◽  
pp. 213-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Shiller ◽  
Takashi Mitsuya ◽  
Ludo Max
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Shiller ◽  
Takashi Mitsuya ◽  
Ludo Max

ABSTRACTPerceiving the sensory consequences of our actions with a delay alters the interpretation of these afferent signals and impacts motor learning. For reaching movements, delayed visual feedback of hand position reduces the rate and extent of visuomotor adaptation, but substantial adaptation still occurs. Moreover, the detrimental effect of visual feedback delay on reach motor learning—selectively affecting its implicit component—can be mitigated by prior habituation to the delay. Auditory-motor learning for speech has been reported to be more sensitive to feedback delay, and it remains unknown whether habituation to auditory delay reduces its negative impact on learning. We investigated whether 30 minutes of exposure to auditory delay during speaking (a) affects the subjective perception of delay, and (b) mitigates its disruptive effect on speech auditory-motor learning. During a speech adaptation task with real-time perturbation of vowel spectral properties, participants heard this frequency-shifted feedback with no delay, 75 ms delay, or 115 ms delay. In the delay groups, 50% of participants had been exposed to the delay throughout a preceding 30-minute block of speaking whereas the remaining participants completed this block without delay. Although habituation minimized awareness of the delay, no improvement in adaptation to the spectral perturbation was observed. Thus, short-term habituation to auditory feedback delays is not effective in reducing the negative impact of delay on speech auditory-motor adaptation. Combined with previous findings, the strong negative effect of delay and the absence of an influence of delay awareness suggest the involvement of predominantly implicit learning mechanisms in speech.HIGHLIGHTSSpeech auditory-motor adaptation to a spectral perturbation was reduced by ~50% when feedback was delayed by 75 or 115 ms.Thirty minutes of prior delay exposure without perturbation effectively reduced participants’ awareness of the delay.However, habituation was ineffective in remediating the detrimental effect of delay on speech auditory-motor adaptation.The dissociation of delay awareness and adaptation suggests that speech auditory-motor learning is mostly implicit.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (11) ◽  
pp. 1657-1682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel M. Brown ◽  
Virginia B. Penhune

Humans must learn a variety of sensorimotor skills, yet the relative contributions of sensory and motor information to skill acquisition remain unclear. Here we compare the behavioral and neural contributions of perceptual learning to that of motor learning, and we test whether these contributions depend on the expertise of the learner. Pianists and nonmusicians learned to perform novel melodies on a piano during fMRI scanning in four learning conditions: listening (auditory learning), performing without auditory feedback (motor learning), performing with auditory feedback (auditory–motor learning), or observing visual cues without performing or listening (cue-only learning). Visual cues were present in every learning condition and consisted of musical notation for pianists and spatial cues for nonmusicians. Melodies were performed from memory with no visual cues and with auditory feedback (recall) five times during learning. Pianists showed greater improvements in pitch and rhythm accuracy at recall during auditory learning compared with motor learning. Nonmusicians demonstrated greater rhythm improvements at recall during auditory learning compared with all other learning conditions. Pianists showed greater primary motor response at recall during auditory learning compared with motor learning, and response in this region during auditory learning correlated with pitch accuracy at recall and with auditory–premotor network response during auditory learning. Nonmusicians showed greater inferior parietal response during auditory compared with auditory–motor learning, and response in this region correlated with pitch accuracy at recall. Results suggest an advantage for perceptual learning compared with motor learning that is both general and expertise-dependent. This advantage is hypothesized to depend on feedforward motor control systems that can be used during learning to transform sensory information into motor production.


1968 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 861-868 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Saxman ◽  
Theodore D. Hanley

Twenty female subjects were required to select, by the method of fractionation, the delay interval judged by them to be one-half the duration of the standard delay interval with which it was paired. The signals judged were the delay intervals between the subjects' own production of the syllable /da/ and its return via delayed auditory feedback. Ten ascending and ten descending one-half judgments were obtained for each subject at each of tie standard delay intervals of 100, 200, 400, and 800 msec. The curves for the ascending, descending, and combined ascending-descending judgments, when plotted against delay intervals in physical time, were all nearly linear with a slight positively accelerated slope. A tentative scale of subjective delay time is described and its implications for evaluating the speech response to DAF as a function of time are noted.


2015 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 950-955 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Vaughn ◽  
Sazzad M. Nasir

Acquiring the skill of speaking in another language, or for that matter a child's learning to talk, does not follow a single recipe. People learn by variable amounts. A major component of speech learnability seems to be sensing precise feedback errors to correct subsequent utterances that help maintain speech goals. We have tested this idea in a speech motor learning paradigm under altered auditory feedback, in which subjects repeated a word while their auditory feedback was changed online. Subjects learned the task to variable degrees, with some simply failing to learn. We assessed feedback contribution by computing one-lag covariance between formant trajectories of the current feedback and the following utterance that was found to be a significant predictor of learning. Our findings rely on a novel use of information-rich formant trajectories in evaluating speech motor learning and argue for their relevance in auditory speech goals of vowel sounds.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhi-Ming Tang ◽  
Yutaka Oouchida ◽  
Meng-Xin Wang ◽  
Zu-Lin Dou ◽  
Shin-Ichi Izumi

Abstract Background:Imitative learning is highly effective from infancy to old age, but little is known about the effects of observing errors during imitative learning. This study aims to examine how observing errors affect imitative learning performance, to maximize the effects of imitative learning. Method:In the pre-training session, participants were instructed to pinch at the target force (8 N) with auditory feedback about generated force while watching videos of someone pinching a sponge at the target force. In the pre-test, participants pinched at the target force without viewing a model or receiving auditory feedback. In Experiment 1, in the main training session, participants imitated models while watching videos of pinching at either the incorrect force (error-mixed condition) or the target force (all-correct condition). Then, the exact force they generated in pinching was measured without receiving auditory feedback or viewing a model. In Experiment 2, using the same procedure in the pre-training and pre-test sessions, newly recruited participants watched pinching at incorrect forces (4 and 24 N) as the all-error condition and the correct force as the correct condition. Results: In Experiment 1, the average force was better in the error-mixed condition than in the correct condition. In Experiment 2, the average force in the correct condition was better than that in the error condition.Conclusion: Our findings indicate that observing error actions combined with correct actions affected imitation motor learning positively, because error actions contain what-not-to-do information about the target action, unlike correct actions, which provide more information to enhance imitative learning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Schiavio ◽  
Renee Timmers

The present study investigated the role of motor and audiovisual learning in the memorization of four tonally ambiguous melodies for piano. A total of one hundred and twenty participants divided into three groups — pianists, other musicians (i.e., not pianists), and nonmusicians — learned the melodies through either playing them on a keyboard (playing condition), through performing the melodies on a piano without auditory feedback (silent playing condition), through watching a video with a performer playing the melodies (seeing condition), or through listening to them (control condition). Participants were exposed to each melody four times during the learning phase (in additional to hearing it once during a familiarization phase). This exposure consisted of an alternation between hearing the melody and engaging with the melody in the way determined by the learning condition. Participants in the control group only received the auditory aspect of the learning phase and listened to each melody twice. Memory of the melodies was tested after a 10-minute break. Our results indicate a benefit of motor learning for all groups of participants, suggesting that active sensorimotor experience plays a key role in musical skill acquisition.


2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Koichi Toida ◽  
Kanako Ueno ◽  
Sotaro Shimada

Temporal contingency between self-body movement and its auditory feedback is crucial to perceive external auditory events. The present study examined whether delay detection of self-generated sound is modulated by short-term exposure of delayed auditory feedback. A total of 36 healthy students participated in Experiment 1 (, age 21.4 ± 1.3 years, mean ± SD) and 2 (, age 20.8 ± 1.4 years). In both experiments, the subject pressed a button with their right index finger and judged whether the auditory feedback (full-range pulsed sound) delivered through a headphone was delayed or not, compared to the sensation of the finger movement. Auditory feedback delay was inserted by using a sound effector device (SPX2000, YAMAHA, Japan). The durations of auditory feedback delay were ranged from 118 to 352 ms at 33.3 ms intervals in Experiment 1, and from 19 to 253 ms in Experiment 2. To calculate the point of subjective equality (PSE), where the delay detection rate was 50%, we have fitted a logistic function to the delay detection probability curve for each subject. The results showed that PSEs were 209.0 and 137.5 ms in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively, which were significantly different (, ). This indicates that PSE was modulated by the range of the delay used in the experiment; PSE became longer as the delay lengthened. We suppose that the perceptual delay in auditory feedback of self-body movement is automatically calibrated to the frequently exposed duration between self-body movement and the auditory feedback.


2012 ◽  
Vol 107 (6) ◽  
pp. 1711-1717 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amélie Rochet-Capellan ◽  
Lara Richer ◽  
David J. Ostry

Does motor learning generalize to new situations that are not experienced during training, or is motor learning essentially specific to the training situation? In the present experiments, we use speech production as a model to investigate generalization in motor learning. We tested for generalization from training to transfer utterances by varying the acoustical similarity between these two sets of utterances. During the training phase of the experiment, subjects received auditory feedback that was altered in real time as they repeated a single consonant-vowel-consonant utterance. Different groups of subjects were trained with different consonant-vowel-consonant utterances, which differed from a subsequent transfer utterance in terms of the initial consonant or vowel. During the adaptation phase of the experiment, we observed that subjects in all groups progressively changed their speech output to compensate for the perturbation (altered auditory feedback). After learning, we tested for generalization by having all subjects produce the same single transfer utterance while receiving unaltered auditory feedback. We observed limited transfer of learning, which depended on the acoustical similarity between the training and the transfer utterances. The gradients of generalization observed here are comparable to those observed in limb movement. The present findings are consistent with the conclusion that speech learning remains specific to individual instances of learning.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document