Study on interactions between voicing production and perception using auditory feedback paradigm

A previous study reported that perturbed auditory feedback affected voicing production [Mitsuya, MacDonald, and Munhall (2014). J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 135, 2986–2994]. In this study, we investigated whether perturbed auditory feedback would also affect voicing perception. Eighteen native Japanese speakers participated in the experiment. Half of the participants performed an auditory feedback task in which a syllable sound /da/ was presented simultaneously with the participant’s utterance of /ta/. The other participants did a passive listening task in which participants heard a syllable sound /da/ without the utterance. Before and after each task, participants performed a speech production task of /da/-/ta/ and a speech identification task of /da/-/ta/ continuum stimuli varying in voice-onset time (VOT). Results showed that perturbed auditory feedback lengthened the VOT of /ta/ production, whereas passive listening did not affect voicing production. Regarding voicing perception, passive listening shortened the VOT boundary of /da/-/ta/, which may be due to selective adaptation. On the other hand, perturbed auditory feedback did not vary the boundary. One interpretation of these results is that the effects of voicing production modulation on voicing perception can be cancelled out by selective adaptation, which may have occurred by listening to a syllable sound /da/ during auditory feedback task.