🎉 I’m very excited to share my first peer-reviewed journal publication in Journal of Phonetics!

I’m very excited to share my first peer-reviewed journal publication! 🎉

“Unpredictable temporal feedback perturbation dissociates mismatch detection from correction,” co-authored with Dr. Sam Tilsen, is now published in Journal of Phonetics 📖

Access the paper here

🧠 The question

Like singers using in-ear monitors to hear their own voice, we continuously hear and monitor our own speech in everyday conversation. 🎧 The best way to study this feedback mechanism is to mess with it. So, what happens when we unexpectedly hear our own speech change while we’re talking? 🙀

🔬How did we study this?

We developed a novel paradigm that briefly and subtly stretches and compresses speakers’ auditory feedback at unpredictable moments as they speak. Despite these small perturbations, speakers consistently responded with a delayed slowing of their speech, although the timing and magnitude of the response varied across individuals. ⏱️

Because the timing of the perturbation was unpredictable, we modeled responses both at the level of individual phones and continuously over time. We trained custom Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) in Kaldi to segment the speech data into individual phones, then used Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) to model how phone durations changed with perturbation timing, along with local relative rate (LRR) to capture continuous changes in speech rate. 📊

🌎 Why does it matter?

More broadly, this work helps us understand how we monitor and control our own speech in real time, contributing to research on speech production, communication, and speech disorders. This project has been a huge part of my PhD journey since I started it in 2023, and seeing it become my first publication is a particularly meaningful milestone.

I’m grateful to Sam for his mentorship and collaboration, to all the participants who endured saying “I saw papa yesterday” 280 times for science, to the Cornell Phonetics Lab, to everyone who engaged with this work at conferences, and to the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. 🧡