Perrachione Lab Repository
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This collection contains manuscripts, supplementary materials, software, datasets, etc, related to the Communication Neuroscience Research Laboratory at Boston University (PI: Tyler Perrachione, PhD).
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Item Noninvasive neurostimulation of left ventral motor cortex enhances sensorimotor adaptation in speech productionScott, Terri; Haenchen, Laura; Daliri, Ayoub; Chartove, Julia; Guenther, Frank; Perrachione, TylerSensorimotor adaptation¬—enduring changes to motor commands due to sensory feedback—allows speakers to match their articulations to intended speech acoustics. How the brain integrates auditory feedback to modify speech motor commands and what limits the degree of these modifications remain unknown. Here, we investigated the role of speech motor cortex in modifying stored speech motor plans. In a within-subjects design, participants underwent separate sessions of sham and anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over speech motor cortex while speaking and receiving altered auditory feedback of the first formant. Anodal tDCS increased the rate of sensorimotor adaptation for feedback perturbation. Computational modeling of our results using the Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) framework of speech production suggested that tDCS primarily affected behavior by increasing the feedforward learning rate. This study demonstrates how focal noninvasive neurostimulation can enhance the integration of auditory feedback into speech motor plans.Item Time and information in perceptual adaptation to speechPerrachione, Tyler; Choi, Ja YoungPerceptual adaptation to a talker enables listeners to efficiently resolve the many-to-many mapping between variable speech acoustics and abstract linguistic representations. However, models of speech perception have not delved into the variety or the quantity of information necessary for successful adaptation, nor how adaptation unfolds over time. In three experiments using speeded classification of spoken words, we explored how the quantity (duration), quality (phonetic detail), and temporal continuity of talker-specific context contribute to facilitating perceptual adaptation to speech. In single- and mixed-talker conditions, listeners identified phonetically-confusable target words in isolation or preceded by carrier phrases of varying lengths and phonetic content, spoken by the same talker as the target word. Word identification was always slower in mixed-talker conditions than single-talker ones. However, interference from talker variability decreased as the duration of preceding speech increased but was not affected by the amount of preceding talker-specific phonetic information. Furthermore, efficiency gains from adaptation depended on temporal continuity between preceding speech and the target word. These results suggest that perceptual adaptation to speech may be understood via models of auditory streaming, where perceptual continuity of an auditory object (e.g., a talker) facilitates allocation of attentional resources, resulting in more efficient perceptual processing.Item Speaker recognition across languages(Oxford University Press, 2017) Perrachione, Tyler K.Listeners identify voices more accurately in their native language than an unknown, foreign language, in a phenomenon known as the language-familiarity effect in talker identification. This effect has been reliably observed for a wide range of different language pairings and using a variety of different methodologies, including voice line-ups, talker identification training, and talker discrimination. What do listeners know about their native language that helps them recognize voices more accurately? Do listeners gain access to this knowledge when they learn a second language? Is linguistic competence necessary, or can mere exposure to a foreign language help listeners identify voices more accurately? In this chapter, I review the more than three decades of research on the language-familiarity effect in talker identification with an emphasis on how attention to this phenomenon can inform not only better psychological and neural models of memory for voices, but also better models of speech processing.Item Learning to identify emotional voices(2017) Perrachione, Tyler; Wong, PatrickRecognizing people by the sound of their voice is an important social skill. What listeners hear as a talker's “voice” is a highly variable signal, the acoustic features of which can change dramatically depending on situational factors such as a talker's emotional state when speaking or the linguistic content of an utterance. A challenge for listeners in talker identification is to maintain perceptual constancy of talker identity across different situations. We investigated listeners’ ability to learn to identify voices from emotional speech and generalize their knowledge of talker identity to new emotional contexts. Listeners learned to identify voices from utterances spoken with neutral, angry, or fearful vocal affects and were then tested on their ability to identify those voices from both trained and untrained affects. Listeners learned talker identity equally well regardless of which emotion was expressed during training. However, in all cases, changing the vocal affect of the speech at test resulted in a significant decrement in talker identification accuracy. These results elucidate how emotional variability impacts social auditory perception: The phonetic changes to speech resulting from the vocal expression of emotion can obscure the correspondence between speech acoustics and talker identity expected by listeners.Item Pitch contour perception test (PCPT)(2014-08-06) Perrachione, Tyler K.A computer-based assessment in PsychoPy to ascertain aptitude for lexical tone learning. The zip archive includes stimulus files, stimulus-presentation scripts, methods and procedure descriptions, and an annotated bibliography. See Wong & Perrachione (2007) in Applied Psycholinguistics for the original description of this test.