Effects of Hearing Status on Adult Speech Production

本申请继续资助的目标是：大大加深我们对 说话者的听觉敏锐度如何影响他或她的言语运动规划;描述言语的动作， 听力受损成年人的听力和生产以及人工耳蜗的效果;并评估和 帮助完善听力在言语中作用的定量模型。我们通过开展前- 实验与正常听力的扬声器，并与postlingually成年人谁接受人工耳蜗， 植物我们的实验测量了植入物对语言的影响，记录了植入前的录音- 随着说话者听觉敏锐度的发展，根据我们的角色模型， 听力在成人言语运动控制中，言语运动的许多目标是在听觉域中。 因此，本研究的一个中心主题是听觉感知在反馈和反馈中的作用。 前向控制系统，用于在语音期间实现听觉目标。前馈控制是一种 在成年人中，大部分都是产生发音运动的原因。然而，当有一个错误- 在讲话过程中，说话人的意图与由此产生的听觉反馈之间的匹配 声音，该误差导致校正电动机命令，其用于更新子 快速移动。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。 本研究探讨了听觉敏锐度在音素和词汇产生中的作用 重音对比;当补偿元音共振峰的反馈扰动或机械扰动时， 当模仿合成元音时。为了测量敏锐度，我们提出了合成 语音识别测试。为了评估与敏锐度的关系，我们测量分离的程度， 对比音位和词汇重音的比例，产出式在音位意义上的分散; 共振峰位移和嘶嘶声光谱的机械扰动的补偿;和模仿准确性。在 在这些实验中，我们也会暂时阻断听觉反馈，以揭示进食的状态。 转发命令分析采用人口统计学变量，如听力损失时的年龄和听力损失持续时间。 植物的用途考虑。 与公共卫生的相关性：听自己说话在保持良好的语言能力方面起着双重作用， 可以纠正语音的发音，即使他们正在发生，它可以修改计划，为亲， 下一次的声音。当说话者听力严重受损时， 功能良好，但随着时间的推移，语言能力会下降。这个项目研究的想法，人们最害怕- 受感染的是那些不能很好地区分不同语音的人。结果可以刺激 研究新的治疗方法，其中某些语言障碍，包括语言发展， 通过训练客户更好地听到他们产生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.