Characterization of phonemic targets through investigation of speakers' adaptive behavior during articulatory and auditory perturbation

The project is focused on the properties of the “image“ of a sound a speaker has in mind when s/he wants to produce the sound (called the phonemic representation). There are two competing views of this representation: The articulatory approach assumes that phonemic representations are articulatory. The speaker aims at producing a certain articulatory gesture, and the listener tries to extract this articulatory information from the acoustic signal produced by the speaker. The acoustic approach assumes that the speaker aims at producing a certain acoustic signal, and the listener interprets this acoustic signal directly without needing to reference the articulation. This project uses a new experimental design to further investigate the nature of phonemic representations and find support for one or the other approach. In this design both the speakers’ articulation and their auditory feedback are being perturbed so that speakers have to adapt. In contrast to previous perturbation experiments, however, the target of adaptation can be interpreted unambiguously as either articulatory or acoustic. Articulation will be perturbed by a palatal prosthesis. Due to auditory feedback manipulation speakers have two possibilities to adapt, either towards an articulatory target (without manipulation of the auditory feedback) or towards an acoustic target (a different articulatory configuration which results in the same acoustic output due to manipulation of the auditory feedback).