Sensorimotor Learning as a Window to Speech Planning

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Pre-registration required for Zoom via email to thoksber@uci.edu.

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How are speech movements planned? Typically, speech production is conceptualized as having separate linguistic and motor planning stages: psycholinguistic models select abstract units (e.g., phonemes or syllables), and models of speech motor control “read out” these units into articulatory movements. However, there is growing evidence that phonemic or syllabic motor programs alone are insufficient to explain patterns of speech behavior, necessitating models in which higher-level linguistic context is incorporated into the motor planning process. In this talk, Niziolek will address the scope of speech planning through a series of experiments that use auditory feedback errors to induce learned changes to the pronunciation of speech sounds. This sensorimotor learning can occur in a context-specific manner, with speakers differentially changing their production of the same phoneme in opposite directions based on its word context. Here, we use sensorimotor learning as a marker of the influence of linguistic context, assessing whether adaptive changes can be differentiated by lexical and phrasal context, syllable position, suprasegmental pitch, and word meaning. The results of these studies delineate when multisyllabic speech is planned holistically and when it relies on pre-specified motor programs that are sequenced online.

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