Effects of Hearing Status on Adult Speech Production

申请继续资助的目的是：显著加深我们对 说话人的听觉敏锐度如何影响他或她的言语运动计划；为了描述言语感知- 听力受损成人的发音和生产以及人工耳蜗术的效果；并评估和 帮助完善听觉在言语中的作用的量化模型。我们追求这些目标是通过开展前 与听力正常的说话者和接受人工耳蜗注射的语言后聋成年人进行对照。 植物。我们的实验在植入前的录音中测量了植入对语音的影响- 随着说话者听觉敏锐度的提高，最长可达两年。根据我们的角色模型 听觉在成人言语运动控制中，许多言语运动的目标都在听觉领域。 因此，这项研究的一个中心主题是听觉知觉在反馈和馈送中的作用- 用于在语音过程中实现听觉目标的前向控制系统。前馈控制是另一种控制方法。 大多数人完全负责在成年人中产生发音动作。然而，当出现失误时- 在演讲过程中，说话人的意图与由此产生的听觉反馈之间的匹配 听起来，该错误会导致纠正电机命令，这些命令用于更新子系统前馈命令 连续的动作。说话人察觉这种不匹配的能力取决于他或她的听觉敏锐度。 这项拟议的研究探讨了听觉敏锐度在产生音素和词汇时的作用 重音对比；当补偿元音共振峰的反馈扰动或机械干扰时- 在模仿合成元音时，发出嘶嘶声的声音。为了测量敏锐度，我们展示了人工合成的 用于辨别测试的语音连续体。为了评估与视力的关系，我们测量SEPA的程度- 对比音素与词汇重音的比例：音素手段周围的产出物分散； 对共振峰漂移和浊音光谱的机械扰动的补偿；以及模仿的准确性。在……里面 在大多数实验中，我们还会暂时阻断听觉反馈，以揭示饲料的状态-- 转发命令。分析采用人口统计学变量，如听力损失的年龄和患病时间。 考虑到植物的使用。 与公共健康相关：倾听自己的讲话对保持良好的言谈举止具有双重作用 可以纠正语音的发音，即使他们正在发生，它可以修改计划，以支持- 下一次降低音量。当说话者听力严重受损时，这两种机制不会 功能良好，随着时间的推移，语言可能会恶化。这个项目研究的是这样一种想法，即大多数人- 受影响的是那些不能很好地区分不同语音的人。结果可以用来刺激 研究某些言语障碍，包括言语发育障碍的新疗法 通过训练客户更好地听到他们发出的声音之间的差异来缓解。

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 percep- tion 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 ex- periments with normal-hearing speakers, and with postlingually deafened adults who receive cochlear im- plants. Our experiments measure the effects of the implants on speech in recordings made before implanta- tion and up to two 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 feed- forward control systems that are used to achieve auditory goals during speech. Feedforward control is al- most entirely responsible for generating articulatory movements in adults. However, when there is a mis- match 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 sub- sequent 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 pertur- bation of sibilant spectra; and when imitating synthesized vowels. To measure acuity we present synthetic speech continua for discrimination testing. To assess relations with acuity, we measure the degree of sepa- ration 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 feed- forward commands. Analyses take demographic variables such as age at hearing loss and duration of im- plant use into account. Relevance to public health: Hearing oneself speak plays a twofold role in maintaining good speech - it may correct the pronunciation of speech sounds even as they are occurring and it can revise plans for pro- ducing the sound next time. When a speaker is seriously hearing-impaired, those two mechanisms do not function well and speech can deteriorate over time. This project studies the idea that the people most af- fected 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.