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Disentangling Effects of Memory Storage and Inter-articulator Coordination on Generalization in Speech Motor Sequence Learning

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Abstract

Generalization in motor control is the extent to which motor learning affects movements in situations different than those in which it originally occurred. Recent data on orofacial speech movements indicates that motor sequence learning generalizes to novel syllable sequences containing phonotactically illegal, but previously practiced, consonant clusters. Practicing an entire syllable, however, results in even larger performance gains compared to practicing just its clusters. These patterns of generalization could reflect language-general changes in phonological memory storage and/or inter-articulator coordination during motor sequence learning. To disentangle these factors, we conducted two experiments in which talkers intensively practiced producing novel syllables containing illegal onset and coda clusters over two consecutive days. During the practice phases of both experiments, we observed that, through repetition, talkers gradually produced the syllables with fewer errors, indicative of learning. After learning, talkers were tested for generalization to single syllables (Experiment 1) or syllable pairs (Experiment 2) that overlapped to varying degrees with the practiced syllables. Across both experiments, we found that performance improvements from practicing syllables with illegal clusters partially generalized to novel syllables that contained those clusters, but performance was more error prone if the clusters occurred in a different syllable position (onset versus coda) as in practice, demonstrating that inter-articulator coordination is contextually sensitive. Furthermore, changing the position of a cluster was found to be more deleterious to motor performance during the production of the second syllables in syllable pairs, which required talkers to store more phonological material in memory prior to articulation, compared to single syllables. This interaction effect reveals a complex interplay between memory storage and inter-articulator coordination on generalization in speech motor sequence learning.

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Notes

  1. We opted not to measure reaction time (RT) in this or the subsequent experiment since this metric of motor performance is contaminated by the simple RT paradigm utilized, i.e., participants could “pre-program” their motor responses prior to the onset of the go-signal, which in turn, would “wash out” potential differences in utterance planning time across conditions (for discussion, see Klapp, 1995, 2003; Wright et al., 2009). Consistent with this hypothesis, no reliable differences in RT were previously reported by Segawa et al. (2019).

  2. Pilot testing also revealed that instructing talkers to produce lists of sequences comprised of three or four syllables was too challenging as error rates approached ceiling.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Barbara Holland, Farwa Faheem, Tess Fairchild, Kaylee Tran, Riccardo Falsini, Cassandra Chappell, and Nicholas Salazar, for assistance with participant recruitment, data collection, and coding. This work benefited from helpful discussions with, or comments from, Susan Nittrouer, Jason Bohland, Jason Tourville, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Gary Dell, Jennifer Segawa, two anonymous reviewers, and audience members at the 2021 Boston Speech Motor Control Symposium and at the 178th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Funding

The work was supported by grants from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (New Investigators Research Grant; M. Masapollo, PI) and the National Institutes of Health (R01 DC007683; F.H. Guenther, PI). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Florida, 1225 Center Drive, Room 2150, Gainesville, FL, 32610, USA

    Matthew Masapollo & Emily Zezas

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Florida, 4131 Turlington Hall, P.O. Box 115454, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Allen Shamsi & Ratree Wayland

  3. Graduate Program in Neuroscience, Boston University, 677 Beacon Street, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Dante J. Smith

  4. Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, 677 Beacon Street, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Frank H. Guenther

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Masapollo, M., Zezas, E., Shamsi, A. et al. Disentangling Effects of Memory Storage and Inter-articulator Coordination on Generalization in Speech Motor Sequence Learning. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 2181–2210 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09998-5

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