Fluent production of speech requires adjusting for any discrepancy between produced and desired speech sounds. Speech can be adjusted automatically (e.g., you reflexively speak louder in a noisy environment), but sometimes conscious monitoring of how well speech matched the target is required (e.g., you try to learn to pronounce a foreign sound you are unfamiliar with). This latter aspect remains little studied. This is a significant gap in current knowledge because some patient groups (e.g., Parkinson's disease) may not notice their own speech impairment, which prevents them from correcting it. In this project, we measure how well individuals notice that the speech they produced did not match their intention, and use this to study what brain mechanisms underlie conscious and unconscious adjustments to speech. We also examine how conscious speech monitoring contributes to speech impairments in Parkinson's disease, and how this is modified by voice-therapeutic interventions.

2022

2026