Children's gestures do not appear to be executed with the same dexterity as adults'. Studies of arm movements have shown that young children's gestures are less accurate, more variable and slower than those of adults. This difference in behavior can be explained by a lack of experience with the sensory consequences of motor acts and still-developing forward models for the control of those acts....

Motor control has long been associated with language skill, in deficits, both acquired and developmental, and in typical development. Most evidence comes from limb praxis however; the link between oral motor control and speech and language has been neglected, despite the fact that most language users talk with their mouths. Oral motor control is affected in a variety of developmental disorders,...

Stuttering is a speech motor control disorder of unknown etiology whose hallmark is part-syllable repetition. The principal aim of this dissertation is to understand the neural mechanisms underlying stuttering through computational modeling with DIVA and GODIVA, neural network models of speech acquisition and production. The first part of the dissertation investigates the hypothesis that stutte...

It has been suggested that the activation of speech-motor areas during speech comprehension may, in part, reflect the involvement of the speech production system in synthesizing upcoming material at an articulatorily specified level. In this study, we explored that suggestion through the use of articulatory imaging. We investigated whether, and how, predictions that emerge during speech compreh...

BACKGROUND Detailed knowledge of the neurophysiology of speech acquisition is important for understanding the developmental aspects of speech perception and production and for understanding developmental disorders of speech perception and production. METHOD A computer implemented neural model of sensorimotor control of speech production was developed. The model is capable of demonstrating the...

Rapid, complex movements of orofacial structures are essential to produce the sounds of speech. A central problem in speech production research is to discover the neural sources that generate the control signals supplied to motoneurons during speaking. Speech movement production appears to share organizational principles with other motor behaviors; thus speech movements probably arise from an i...

Speech is a motor task during which speaker communicate a message using temporal variation of an acoustic signal that is shaped by orofacial gestures, while listeners perceive this message using both the auditory perception of the acoustic signal and the vision of the articulatory gestures. In order to study this motor task, scientists try to collect and to analyze a large amount of kinematic d...

Auditory responses to speech sounds that are self-initiated are suppressed compared to responses to the same speech sounds during passive listening. This phenomenon is referred to as speech-induced suppression, a potentially important feedback-mediated speech-motor control process. In an earlier study, we found that both adults who do and do not stutter demonstrated a reduced amplitude of the a...

Adults who stutter (AWS) have demonstrated atypical coordination of motor and sensory regions during speech production. Yet little is known of the speech-motor network in AWS in the brief time window preceding audible speech onset. The purpose of the current study was to characterize neural oscillations in the speech-motor network during preparation for and execution of overt speech production ...