Sensorimotor control of vocal production in early childhood

Children maintain fluent speech despite dramatic changes to their articulators during development. Auditory feedback aids in the acquisition and maintenance of the sensorimotor mechanisms that underlie vocal motor control. MacDonald, Johnson, Forsythe, Plante, and Munhall (2012) reported that toddlers' speech motor control systems may "suppress" the influence of auditory feedback, since exposure to altered auditory feedback regarding their formant frequencies did not lead to modifications of their speech. This finding is not parsimonious with most theories of motor control. Here, we exposed toddlers to perturbations to the pitch of their auditory feedback as they vocalized. Toddlers compensated for the manipulations, producing significantly different responses to upward and downward perturbations. These data represent the first empirical demonstration that toddlers use auditory feedback for vocal motor control. Furthermore, our findings suggest toddlers are more sensitive to changes to the postural properties of their auditory feedback, such as fundamental frequency, relative to the phonemic properties, such as formant frequencies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).