The effect of delaying auditory feedback of selected components of the speech signal

Abstract

Can the disturbance that occurs in delayed auditory feedback tasks be explained by problems caused by the amplitude contour of the displaced signal, or is information about the position of the articulators used for feedback control? To test these alternative hypotheses of the effects of delayed auditory feedback, the effects of varying the amplitude contour of the delayed signal were assessed when phonetic information in the delayed signal was degraded. Two experiments are reported in which the speech signal is split into two bands and each band is delayed by different times. The amplitude of one or both of these bands was varied in Experiment 2. Performance was not as disrupted when only one band was delayed as when both were. In Experiment 2, it was found that increasing the amplitude of the band that was not delayed did not disrupt performance, whereas increasing the amplitude of the delayed band did disrupt performance, particularly at a delay of 200 msec. The results are interpreted as showing that the amplitude contour of the displaced signal causes control problems with speech in delayed auditory feedback tasks. © 1983 Psychonomic Society, Inc.