Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The overarching long-term objective of my research program is to investigate the development of speech production/perception relationships in children. In the last five decades, it has been claimed that multiple sources of sensory feedback are used to monitor the speech articulators, the most important of which are auditory and somatosensory feedback. From a developmental perspective, sensory feedback is crucial to acquire the appropriate articulatory positions for vowels and consonants. Although many studies have been conducted on the role of feedback in speech production, none has addressed this issue in children, using original data on articulatory movements, acoustic parameters, and perceptual measures. For the next five years, the overall objective of my research program is to study the role of auditory and somatosensory feedback in speech production in preschool- and school-aged children. To this end, the three short-term objectives (STOs) of this proposal are (a) to investigate the development of auditory and somatosensory perception of speech sounds; (b) to study the role of auditory and somatosensory feedback during speech production using the real-time perturbation paradigm; and (c) to determine the perceptual consequences (intelligibility) of the speech produced in (b). To achieve these objectives, we propose to make kinematic and acoustic recordings of speech sequences produced by typically developing children and by adults. Perceptual tests will also be conducted and the results will be compared to the production data. The innovative nature of this research program resides primarily in the problem addressed: while the impact of sensory perception on speech development has been the subject of numerous studies, none has focused on an integrated articulatory and acoustic analysis of strategies to compensate for altered multimodal sensory feedback. Furthermore, our proposed method, which combines infrared motion capture and ultrasound imaging, is unique. Our research program will lead to ground-breaking advances in the area of sensorimotor development in speech, and will contribute to the development of innovative technological tools. Indeed, by providing original data on the interaction of sound categories and speech perception in children, our program will allow us to consolidate and expand our collaborations with vocal technology companies (such as Quartz 3D) to develop virtual growing talking heads designed to improve second language learning. Our proposed research program will also create a research environment conducive to the training of highly qualified personnel (undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) in the area of oral language processing.