ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
This article is part of the Research TopicNew Perspectives on the Role of Sensory Feedback in Speech Production: Volume IIIView all 3 articles
Adaptation response to pitch shift during speech is attenuated upon relearning
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Radiology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
- 2Department of Otolaryngology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
During sensorimotor adaptation, participants respond to a persistent sensory error by shifting behavior to oppose the error. This phenomenon has been measured in multiple motor tasks in which sensory feedback is experimentally altered to artificially introduce an error. Tasks involving multiple cycles of altered and unaltered feedback have been used in the arm reaching domain to understand the mechanisms of un-learning and re-learning a response to an error, but re-learning within a single session has not been studied in the domain of fundamental frequency (f0) control during speech. In this study, participants responded to three alternating blocks of f0-shifted and unshifted auditory feedback during a single-word speech task. It was found that on average, adaptation magnitude decreased in the second and third blocks of shifted feedback compared to the first. This illustrates an attenuation effect similar to that observed in studies of implicit learning in arm reaching tasks. These results support the understanding of f0 control as an implicit learning phenomenon and help place f0 control in the context of motor control in general.
Keywords: Speech Motor Control, Sensorimotor adaptation, motor learning, fundamental frequency, pitch
Received: 19 Aug 2025; Accepted: 30 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gaines, Dale, Houde and Nagarajan. 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: Jessica L Gaines
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.