Impaired timing adjustments in response to time-varying auditory perturbation during connected speech production in persons who stutter.
Auditory feedback (AF), the speech signal received by a speaker's own auditory system, contributes to the online control of speech movements. Recent studies based on AF perturbation provided evidence for abnormalities in the integration of auditory error with ongoing articulation and phonation in persons who stutter (PWS), but stopped short of examining connected speech. This is a crucial limitation considering the importance of sequencing and timing in stuttering. In the current study, we imposed time-varying perturbations on AF while PWS and fluent participants uttered a multisyllabic sentence. Two distinct types of perturbations were used to separately probe the control of the spatial and temporal parameters of articulation. While PWS exhibited only subtle anomalies in the AF-based spatial control, their AF-based fine-tuning of articulatory timing was substantially weaker than normal, especially in early parts of the responses, indicating slowness in the auditory-motor integration for temporal control.
Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. Electronic address: scai@bu.edu.
Shanqing
S
Cai
Institute for Stuttering Treatment and Research and Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, Faculty of Rehabilitative Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Deryk S
DS
Beal
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Satrajit S
SS
Ghosh
Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA.
Frank H
FH
Guenther
Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA.
Joseph S
JS
Perkell
D000328:Adult; D056228:Feedback, Sensory; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010699:Phonation; D013060:Speech; D013342:Stuttering / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013997:Time Factors
Auditory feedback; Sensorimotor integration; Speech production; Speech timing; Stuttering