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Abstract:
Human subjects are known to adapt their motor behavior to a
shift of the visual field brought about by wearing prism glasses
over their eyes. We have studied the analog of this phenomenon in
the speech domain. Utilizing a device that can feed back
transformed speech signals in real time, we exposed subjects to
phonetically sensible, on-line perturbations of their own speech
patterns. We found that speakers learn to adjust their production
of a vowel to compensate for feedback alterations that change the
vowel's perceived phonetic identity; moreover, the effect
generalizes across phonetic contexts. This phenomenon provides a
new tool for probing the nature of the sensorimotor control system
underlying human speech production.
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