Effects of Hearing Status on Adult Speech Production

描述（由申请人提供）：本申请继续资助的目标是： 显着加深我们对演讲者的听觉敏锐度如何影响其言语运动规划的理解；描述听力受损成年人的言语感知和产生以及人工耳蜗的效果；评估并帮助完善听力在言语中的作用的定量模型。我们通过对听力正常的说话者和接受人工耳蜗植入的语后聋成年人进行实验来实现这些目标。我们的实验测量了植入物对植入前和植入后两年内的录音（随着说话者听觉敏锐度的变化）的影响。根据我们的听力在成人言语运动控制中的作用模型，言语运动的许多目标都在听觉领域。因此，这项研究的中心主题是听觉感知在反馈和前馈控制系统中的作用，这些系统用于在语音过程中实现听觉目标。前馈控制几乎完全负责成人的关节运动。然而，当说话者的意图与产生语音期间产生的听觉反馈之间存在不匹配时，该错误会导致校正运动命令，用于更新后续运动的前馈命令。说话者检测这种不匹配的能力取决于他或她的听觉敏锐度。拟议的研究探讨了听觉敏锐度在产生音素和词汇重音对比时的作用；当补偿元音共振峰的反馈扰动或齿擦音频谱的机械扰动时；以及模仿合成元音时。为了测量敏锐度，我们提出了用于辨别测试的合成语音延续。为了评估与敏锐度的关系，我们测量对比音素和词汇重音的分离程度；作品围绕其音素手段的分散；补偿共振峰位移和嘶嘶声频谱的机械扰动；和模仿的准确性。在大多数实验中，我们还暂时阻止听觉反馈，以揭示前馈命令的状态。分析考虑了人口统计变量，例如听力损失年龄和植入物使用时间。与公共健康的相关性：听到自己说话对于保持良好的言语起着双重作用——即使正在发生语音，它也可以纠正发音，并且可以修改下次发出声音的计划。当说话者患有严重听力障碍时，这两种机制就无法正常发挥作用，并且语音会随着时间的推移而恶化。该项目研究了这样一种观点：受影响最严重的人是那些无法很好地区分不同语音的人。这些结果可以促进新疗法的研究，通过训练客户更好地听到他们发出的声音之间的差异，可以缓解某些言语障碍，包括言语发育障碍。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals of this application for continuation funding are: to deepen significantly our understanding of how a speaker's auditory acuity influences his or her speech motor planning; to describe the speech perception and production of hearing-impaired adults and the effects of cochlear prostheses; and to evaluate and help refine a quantitative model of the role of hearing in speech. We pursue these goals by conducting experiments with normal-hearing speakers, and with postlingually deafened adults who receive cochlear implants. Our experiments measure the effects of the implants on speech in recordings made before implantation and up to 2 years after, as speakers' auditory acuity evolves. According to our model of the role of hearing in adult speech motor control, many of the goals of speech movements are in the auditory domain. Consequently, a central theme of this research is the role of auditory perception in the feedback and feedforward control systems that are used to achieve auditory goals during speech. Feedforward control is almost entirely responsible for generating articulatory movements in adults. However, when there is a mismatch between the speaker's intention and the resulting auditory feedback during production of a speech sound, that error leads to corrective motor commands that serve to update feedforward commands for subsequent movements. The speaker's ability to detect such a mismatch depends on his or her auditory acuity. The proposed research inquires into the role of auditory acuity when producing phoneme and lexical stress contrasts; when compensating for feedback perturbation of vowel formants or for mechanical perturbation of sibilant spectra; and when imitating synthesized vowels. To measure acuity, we present synthetic speech continuation for discrimination testing. To assess relations with acuity, we measure the degree of separation of contrastive phonemes and lexical stress; dispersion of productions around their phoneme means; compensation for formant shift and for mechanical perturbation of sibilant spectra; and imitation accuracy. In most of these experiments, we also block auditory feedback temporarily in order to reveal the state of feedforward commands. Analyses take demographic variables such as age at hearing loss and duration of implant use into account. Relevance to public health: Hearing oneself speak plays a 2-fold role in maintaining good speech-it may correct the pronunciation of speech sounds even as they are occurring and it can revise plans for producing the sound next time. When a speaker is seriously hearing-impaired, those 2 mechanisms do not function well and speech can deteriorate over time. This project studies the idea that the people most affected are those who cannot distinguish the different speech sounds well. The results can serve to stimulate research on new therapies in which certain speech disorders, including those of speech development, are alleviated by training clients to hear differences better among the sounds that they produce.