# Speech sensorimotor relationships in francophone preschoolers and adults: Adaptation to real-time auditory feedback perturbations

## TL;DR

The study shows how young children adapt to changes in their speech sounds differently than adults, with more variability and exploration.

## Contribution

It reveals that children's increased speech variability helps them learn sensorimotor relationships through exploration.

## Key findings

- Preschoolers showed more trial-to-trial variability in adapting to auditory feedback perturbations than adults.
- Children's adaptation was linked to baseline production variability, while adults' adaptation correlated with perceptual function slope.

## Abstract

This study investigates the development of sensorimotor relationships by examining adaptation to real-time perturbations of auditory feedback.

Acoustic signals were recorded while preschoolers and adult speakers of Canadian French produced several utterances of the front rounded vowel /ø/ for which F2 was gradually shifted up to a maximum of 40%.

The findings indicate that, although preschool-aged children produced overall similar responses to the perturbed feedback, they displayed significantly more trial-to-trial variability than adults. Furthermore, whereas the magnitude of the adaptation in adults was positively correlated with the slope of the perceptual categorical function, the amount of adaptation in children was linked to the variability of their productions in the baseline condition. These patterns suggest that the immature motor control observed in children, which contributes to increased variability in their speech production, plays a role in shaping adaptive behavior, as it allows children to explore articulatory/acoustic spaces and learn sensorimotor relationships.