University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States.
J Neurophysiol. 2024 Nov 1;132(5):1437-1444. doi: 10.1152/jn.00240.2024. Epub 2024 Oct 2.
When speakers learn to change the way they produce a speech sound, how much does that learning generalize to other speech sounds? Past studies of speech sensorimotor learning have typically tested the generalization of a single transformation learned in a single context. Here, we investigate the ability of the speech motor system to generalize learning when multiple opposing sensorimotor transformations are learned in separate regions of the vowel space. We find that speakers adapt to a nonuniform "centralization" perturbation, learning to produce vowels with greater acoustic contrast, and that this adaptation generalizes to untrained vowels, which pattern like neighboring trained vowels and show increased contrast of a similar magnitude. We show that sensorimotor adaptation of vowels at the edges of the articulatory working space generalizes to intermediate vowels through local transfer of learning from adjacent vowels. These results extend findings on the locality of sensorimotor learning from upper limb control to speech, a complex task with an opaque and nonlinear transformation between motor actions and sensory consequences. Our results also suggest that our paradigm has potential to drive behaviorally relevant changes that improve communication effectiveness.
当说话者学会改变他们产生语音的方式时，这种学习在多大程度上可以推广到其他语音？过去关于语音运动学习的研究通常测试了在单个上下文中学习的单个转换的泛化。在这里，我们研究了语音运动系统在元音空间的不同区域学习多个相反的运动转换时的泛化能力。我们发现，说话者适应了一种非均匀的“集中化”干扰，学会了发出具有更大声学对比度的元音，并且这种适应可以推广到未受过训练的元音，这些元音的模式与相邻的训练元音相似，并显示出类似幅度的对比度增加。我们表明，在发音工作空间边缘的元音的运动适应通过从相邻元音的局部学习转移，推广到中间元音。这些结果将上肢控制的运动学习的局部性扩展到了语音，这是一项复杂的任务，其中运动动作和感官后果之间存在不透明的非线性转换。我们的结果还表明，我们的范例有可能推动具有改善沟通效果的行为相关性变化。
