Auditory feedback and articulatory timing

Talkers listen to their own voice while they speak and use that feedback to monitor and control fine details of speech production. When auditory feedback is perturbed in real time, talkers spontaneously alter their speech production to compensate for the perturbation. Most research using real‐time altered auditory feedback has focused on spectral manipulations of vowels with little attention devoted to temporal manipulations of consonants.

In the present study, we examine the role of acoustic feedback in control of voice onset time (VOT). Utterances of the words “tip” and “dip” were recorded from native English speakers, and several representative productions were selected for each speaker. After this, talkers were asked to repeatedly produce either tip or dip.

During these productions a real‐time processing system was used to provide modified feedback through headphones. When talkers said one word, they simultaneously heard their own voice saying the other word. Results showed that the speakers compensated for the VOT perturbation such that they lengthened their VOT for /t/ when the VOT of the feedback was shorter (/d/).

Based on these results, a comparison of the role of auditory feedback in controlling temporal and spectral aspects of speech production will be discussed.