ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1628114
This article is part of the Research TopicNew Perspectives on the Role of Sensory Feedback in Speech Production: Volume IIIView all articles
Delayed Auditory Feedback Increases Speech Production Variability in Typically Fluent Adults but has the Opposite Effect in Stuttering Adults
Provisionally accepted
- 1Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
- 2University of Washington, Seattle, United States
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Purpose: Extensive evidence indicates that auditory-motor integration during speech production is inefficient in individuals who stutter and that speaking with delayed auditory feedback (DAF) increases speech fluency in this population. However, the exact mechanisms underlying these auditory-motor integration difficulties and the DAF-induced fluency enhancement remain unknown. Here, we examined (1) whether stuttering is associated with increased variability in the feedforward component of sensorimotor control and (2) whether speaking with DAF reduces this variability in speech movement planning in adults who stutter.Method: We extracted acoustic measures from audio recordings made during a prior study that included twelve right-handed adults who stutter and twelve age-, sex-, and handedness-matched nonstuttering adults. Participants produced front vowels in the context of monosyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant words in conditions where they spoke with either normal auditory feedback (NAF) or 100-ms DAF. For each participant in each condition, we calculated trial-totrial formant variability to assess feedforward processes.Results: Relative to nonstuttering adults, stuttering adults generally showed greater trial-to-trial formant variability. DAF had a differential influence on trial-to-trial formant variability, increasing it for non-stuttering adults but decreasing it for stuttering adults.Conclusion: These findings suggest that stuttering adults generated more variable motor commands than nonstuttering adults when speaking with NAF, but that speaking with DAF decreased variability in the stuttering group, even though it increased variability in the nonstuttering group. One possible interpretation of these findings is that stuttering modulates the sensorimotor system's processing of auditory errors, specifically influencing how significantly these errors are weighted when the sensorimotor system determines its responses to the errors.
Keywords: Stuttering, variability, delayed auditory feedback, Feedforwad control, Speech
Received: 13 May 2025; Accepted: 13 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Daliri, Honda and Max. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ayoub Daliri, Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
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