Adaptive auditory-motor control of the time-varying formant trajectories in vowels and its patterns of generalization
Name
792751615-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
8.05 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5e1cbb84dd018119cbcd6866ce889e0d
Author(s)
Cai, Shanqing
Advisor(s)
Joseph S. Perkell.
Date Issued
2012
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis aims at elucidating the role of auditory feedback in the learning and planning of complex articulatory gestures in time-varying phonemes. To this end, we studied native Mandarin speakers' responses to perturbations of their auditory feedback of the first and second formant trajectories during the production of the Mandarin triphthong /iau/. On the group level, subjects adaptively adjusted their productions to partially compensate for the perturbations in auditory feedback under both the F1 and F2 perturbations. But considerable between-individual variation existed. The result indicate that auditory feedback-based learning and control of speech movements is not restricted to quasi-static gestures in monophthongs as found in previous studies, but also extends to time-varying gestures. To probe the internal structure of the mechanisms of auditory-motor transformations in speech, we tested the pattern of generalization of the adaptation trained on the triphthong /iau/ to other vowels with different spatial and temporal characteristics in the same language. A broad but weak and decaying pattern of generalization was observed under the F1 perturbation; the strength of the generalization diminished with increasing dissimilarity from /iau/. No significant transfer of adaptation was found under the perturbation of F2. The details and implications of the pattern of generalization are examined and discussed in light of previous sensorimotor adaptation studies of speech and limb motor control and a neurocomputational model of speech motor control.
Description
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-65).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
M.I.T. theses are protected by
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written
permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
