A cross-language study of compensatory response to formant-shifted feedback. Program abstracts of the 157th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America

Previous experiments in speech motor learning have demonstrated that the perception of our own voice while we speak plays a role in the control of fundamental and formant frequencies and vocal amplitude. When feedback is changed in real time, subjects alter speech production in attempt to compensate for the perturbation. By testing Japanese talkers in their native and a less familiar language (as well as English‐speaking controls), we examine how this perception‐production process is influenced by language. In the first study, native Japanese speakers produced an English word with formant‐shifted feedback. In the second experiment, native Japanese speakers produced a Japanese syllable with altered feedback and produced an English word that contained a similar vowel with normal feedback. The results were compared with data from English controls and suggest that the compensatory behavior is not language dependent.