I am writing a third blog on this strange experimental protocol in which the talker produces a syllable repeatedly and the talker’s speech output is altered in a systematic fashion so that the talker hears him or herself say something that does not correspond to their own articulatory gestures. I am fascinated by these experiments because they are a window onto feedback control which is essential for a successful speech therapy outcome. Initially in traditional speech therapy the SLP is providing a lot of external feedback about the child’s articulatory gestures (knowledge of performance feedback) and the correctness of the child’s speech output (knowledge of results feedback). But given that the SLP cannot follow the child around outside the clinic room, eventually the child must learn to use self-generated feedback for speech motor learning to occur. Can children use auditory feedback to change their own speech?
In a previous blog, On Birds and Speech Therapy, I discussed interesting work from Queen’s University suggesting that toddlers do not use feedback control like adults do during speech motor learning. These researchers found that adults will compensate for perturbations of their own speech by adjusting their articulation to get the desired auditory feedback. In contrast, very young children do not compensate in this way. I suggested that this may be because toddlers do not perceive speech with the same degree of precision as adults. This hypothesis was supported by another study in which speakers of French and English did not show the same compensation effect to a perturbation that made their vowels sound like a French vowel. The English talkers did not respond to a perturbation to which they were not perceptually sensitive (see Feedback Control and Speech Therapy Revisited).
Recently, I was delighted to find another study involving children provides even stronger confirmation that perceptual representations play a key role in the child’s ability to use feedback for speech motor learning. Shiller and Rochon (2014) randomly assigned 5- to 7-year-old children with typical speech to two training conditions: the control group received speech perception training for the /b/-/d/ contrast; the experimental group received speech perception training for the /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast. Prior to and subsequent to this training both groups experienced the perturbation experiment: both groups repeated said “Beb” while their own speech was altered to sound more like “Bab”. Prior to perceptual training, both groups showed a small compensation for this perturbation in the feedback of their own speech. After speech perception training the experimental group showed twice as much compensation as before whereas the control group showed no change in the amount of compensation. The results show that children can indeed use feedback for speech motor adaptation; furthermore, this ability improves as perceptual boundaries between phoneme categories become better defined —with age or with training.
The conclusions of the study are very gratifying. Citing my own work on the importance of speech perception training as a strategy to facilitate speech production learning by children with speech sound disorders, the authors conclude:
“The results of the present study complement this work nicely, demonstrating that improvements in children’s auditory perceptual abilities do not simply improve motor performance, but also alter the capacity for auditory-feedback based speech motor learning—a process that is central to the clinical treatment of speech production disorders.” (p. 1314)
No surprise that I like this study a lot!
Developmental Phonological Disorders 