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Preliminary Study Exploring Corrective Responses to Task Relevant and Task Irrelevant Errors in Speech Production
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Anuradha Jyothi Sreedhar1, Ayoub Daliri1; 1Arizona State University
The Speech Motor System (SMS) monitors the auditory feedback to detect speech output errors and maintain speech production accuracy (Houde & Nagarajan, 2011). When the SMS detects an error, it generates Corrective Responses (CR) to adjust for the error within the same production and Adaptive Responses (AR) to adjust for the error in the subsequent production (Daliri, 2021). The brain evaluates errors based on relevance and responds more to errors possibly attributed to our actions (Daliri et al., 2020). We previously showed that Adaptive Responses are smaller for task-irrelevant errors, i.e., errors that do not correspond with the participant’s speech, in comparison to task-relevant errors, i.e., errors that were related to the participant’s speech, in an Adaptation paradigm, wherein errors are continuously applied (Daliri & Dittman, 2019). This study aims to explore if there is a difference in Corrective Responses between task-relevant errors and task-irrelevant errors in a Compensation paradigm wherein errors are applied randomly. We recruited 10 participants for our preliminary study. We experimentally introduced errors by manipulating the participants’ auditory feedback based on their speech–formant frequencies. We applied two types of participant-specific formant perturbations: (i) Formant Shift – task-relevant errors (ii) Formant Clamp – task-irrelevant errors in two directions: ɛ-to-æ and ɛ-to-outside the vowel space, for three magnitudes: 0.5, 1, 1.5 along the /ɛ-æ/ line. The experimental session included 7 blocks of ɛ-to-æ perturbations and 7 blocks of ɛ-to-outside the vowel space perturbations, and each block either had ɛ-to-æ perturbations or ɛ-to-outside the vowel space perturbations. Each block had 120 trials, out of which there were 108 word trials (/hɛd/, /hɛp/, and /hɛck/) and 12 sentence trials, such that 2 sentence-trials were presented after every 18 word-trials. The 108 word-trials were categorized into 72 unperturbed trials and 36 perturbed trials. Out of the 36 perturbed trials, 18 trials had Formant Shift perturbations (6 trials per perturbation magnitude: 0.5, 1, 1.5 along the /ɛ-æ/ line) and the other 18 trials had Formant Clamp perturbations (6 trials per perturbation magnitude: 0.5, 1, 1.5 along the /ɛ-æ/ line). The study used a compensation paradigm wherein formant perturbations were randomly applied to the word-trials. Our preliminary results show that the Corrective Responses to task-relevant errors are similar to task-irrelevant errors. This could imply that the brain possibly evaluates both task-relevant and task-irrelevant errors similarly when randomly introduced. Overall, this study explores the basic mechanisms underlying the speech motor system from the purview of error relevance and correction.
Topic Areas: Speech Motor Control,