Speech Production as State Feedback Control

By John F. Houde, Srikantan S. Nagarajan. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2011

441 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spoken language exists because of a remarkable neural process. Inside a speaker's brain, an intended message gives rise to neural signals activating the muscles of the vocal tract. The process is remarkable because these muscles are activated in just the right way that the vocal tract produces sounds a listener understands as the intended message. What is the best approach to understanding the neural substrate of this crucial motor control process? One of the key recent modeling developments in neuroscience has been the use of state feedback control (SFC) theory to explain the role of the CNS in motor control. SFC postulates that the CNS controls motor output by (1) estimating the current dynamic state of the thing (e.g., arm) being controlled, and (2) generating controls based on this estimated state. SFC has successfully predicted a great range of non-speech motor phenomena, but as yet has not received attention in the speech motor control community. Here, we review some of the key characteristics of speech motor control and what they say about the role of the CNS in the process. We then discuss prior efforts to model the role of CNS in speech motor control, and argue that these models have inherent limitations – limitations that are overcome by an SFC model of speech motor control which we describe. We conclude by discussing a plausible neural substrate of our model.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7dfce7fc4c90f1cd679ad7de6fe08dfc93ca300

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Citations in the corpus

Converging toward a common speech code: imitative and perceptuo-motor recalibration processes in speech production (2013, neutral): “…motor parameters (Guenther, 1995; Perkell et al., 1997; Guenther et al., 1998; Houde and Jordan, 1998; for recent reviews, see Perkell et al., 2000; Guenther, 2006; Hickok et al., 2011; Houde and Nagarajan, 2011; Guenther and Vladusich, 2012; Hickok, 2012; Perkell, 2012; Perrier, 2012).”
eview hat is that little voice inside my head ? Inner speech henomenology , its role in cognitive performance , and ts relation to self-monitoring (2014, methodology): “[133,137,138]) and lso to inner speech [59,139–141].”
The Gesture as an Autonomous Nonlinear Dynamical System (2016, background): “See Houde and Nagarajan (2011) and Tourville and Guenther (2011) for speech and Todorov (2005) and Shadmehr andMussa-Ivaldi (2012) for general treatments of this interplay.”
Computational neuroanatomy of speech production (2012, background): “3) builds on models proposed by Guenther et al. 5 , Tian and Poeppel 12 , and Houde and Nagarajan 42 .”
Neurobiology of language (2016, background): “…from auditory (temporal cortex) and somatosensory (inferior parietal cortex) areas (Guenther, Ghosh, & Tourville, 2006; Hickok, 2012; Hickok, Houde, & Rong, 2011; Houde & Nagarajan, 2011; see Blumstein & Baum for discussion of neuroimaging studies supporting this view, Chapter 55, this volume).”
Bridging verbal coordination and neural dynamics (2025, unknown): “Conversely, increased HFa during poor coordination may signify greater mismatch, consistent with prediction error theories (Houde & Nagarajan, 2011; Friston et al., 2020).”
Processing of auditory feedback in perisylvian and insular cortex (2024, background): “SIS and related phenomena are components of the speech motor control system, the purpose of which is to ensure ongoing sensory feedback is in line with feedforward expectations generated prior to articulation (Guenther, 2016; Houde & Nagarajan, 2011; Tourville & Guenther, 2011).”