Opposing and following responses in sensorimotor speech control: Why responses go both ways
When talking, speakers continuously monitor and use the auditory feedback of theirown voice to control and inform speech production processes. When speakers areprovided with auditory feedback that is perturbed in real time, most of themcompensate for this by opposing the feedback perturbation. But some speakers followthe perturbation. In the current study we investigated whether the state of the speechsystem at perturbation onset may determine what type of response (opposing orfollowing) is given. The results suggest that whether a perturbation-related response isopposing or following depends on ongoing fluctuations of the speech system: The motorsystem initially responds by doing the opposite of what it was doing. This effect and thenon-trivial proportion of following responses suggest that current production modelsare inadequate: They need to account for why responses to unexpected sensoryfeedback depend on the production-system’s state at the time of perturbation.