Jeffery Jones, Wilfrid Laurier University

Hearing one’s own voice provides important sensory feedback for regulating ongoing speech, and for the maintenance of feedforward models that map speech sounds onto articulator movements. Researchers have made great headway in understanding the sensorimotor control of speech by exposing participants in the lab to altered versions of their auditory feedback and evaluating their vocal and brain responses to those alterations. However, the average responses observed across participants is often strikingly different than the responses of certain individuals within the population. We have been attempting to determine the source of the between individual differences (and within individual differences) in the response to perceived errors in vocal pitch. One potential source of these differences could be the attention paid to the ongoing vocalizations during an experiment. Over a series of experiments, we have manipulated the attentional resources focused on the speech stimuli. Together our results suggest that attention influences the speech motor control system and the use of auditory feedback for the regulation and planning of speech motor commands.