Increased vowel contrast and intelligibility in connected speech induced by sensorimotor adaptation.

ABSTRACT: Alterations to sensory feedback can drive robust adaptive changes to the production of consonants and vowels, but these changes often have no behavioral relevance or benefit to communication (e.g., making "head" more like "had"). This work aims to align the outcomes of adaptation with changes known to increase speech intelligibility - specifically, adaptations that increase the acoustic contrast between vowels in running speech. To this end, we implemented a vowel centralization feedback perturbation paradigm that pushes all vowels towards the center of vowel space, making them sound less distinct from one another. Speakers across the adult lifespan adapted to the centralization perturbation during sentence production, increasing the global acoustic contrast among vowels and the articulato

SUBMITTER: Beach SD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11326165 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature