ABSTRACT
Studies of perception and stimulus encoding have yielded a great deal of information about the functions of the auditory system. However, our knowledge of auditory functions related to self-generated sounds, including both human speech and primate vocalization, is limited. Such sensory inputs often have important behavioral effects. Humans continuously, and unconsciously, monitor their speech in order to compensate for any perturbations in acoustic structure. Shifts in the spectral profile of speech feedback, for example, result in compensatory changes in both the produced fundamental and formant frequencies (Burnett et al., 1998; Houde & Jordan 1998). Animals show similar feedback-dependant vocal control behavior, including temporal patterning in birdsong (Leonardo & Konishi, 1999), frequency in bat echolocation sounds (Smotherman et al., 2003) and amplitude in primate vocalizations (Sinnott et al., 1975). The neural mechanisms underlying this type of sensory-motor control and the function of the auditory system during vocal production remain largely unknown.
