Susceptibility to auditory feedback manipulations and individual variability

Monitoring auditory feedback from hearing one’s own voice is important for fluent speech production as it enables detection and correction of speech errors. The influence of auditory feedback is best illustrated by manipulating it during speech production. A common temporal manipulation technique, delaying auditory feedback (DAF), leads to disruptions in speech fluency, while a common spectral manipulation technique, perturbing the pitch of auditory feedback (PAF), results in vocal alterations.

Previous research involving clinical populations has revealed diverse susceptibility profiles to auditory feedback manipulations, yet the extent of such diversity within the neurotypical population remains unclear. Furthermore, different types of manipulations elicit distinct speech errors (i.e. fluency/coordination versus acoustic errors), which may be processed by distinct error correction mechanisms. It is yet to be understood whether individuals affected by one manipulation are similarly impacted by the other. Lastly, based on evidence from clinical studies, which demonstrated that visual feedback can improve impaired speech production, it is an open question whether visual feedback can alleviate the disruptive effects of altered auditory feedback.

We recorded voice samples from 40 neurotypical participants during both a DAF and a PAF task. DAF significantly prolonged articulation duration and increased voice pitch and intensity. In some trials, participants received immediate visual feedback, however visual feedback did not alleviate but rather strengthened the disruptive effects of DAF. During the PAF task, participants adjusted their voice pitch in the opposite direction of the perturbation in majority of the trials to compensate for the perturbation. We assessed susceptibility of the participants to the effects of DAF and PAF by examining articulation duration and compensatory vocal response magnitude, respectively. Susceptibility varied widely among participants for both manipulations, but individuals susceptible to one manipulation did not consistently exhibit susceptibility to the other, indicating distinct processing mechanisms for these different types of auditory feedback manipulations.