Schedule of Events | Symposia

Late speech error monitoring is impaired if one’s own voice cannot be accessed during vocal errors.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Marlene Buch¹ (marlene.buch@ku.de), Robert Steinhauser¹, Peter Löschner¹, Marco Steinhauser¹; ¹Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

There is a consensus that a joint mechanism is responsible for monitoring both pre- and post-articulatory processes in speech production. Theories diverge, however, regarding the importance of processing one’s own vocal speech. The error-related negativity (Ne/ERN) is viewed as a correlate of early internal error monitoring that does not rely on sensory feedback. The error positivity (Pe), however, represents a later stage of error processing and results from an evidence accumulation process that leads to error awareness. The Pe could potentially be influenced by auditory feedback but has only sparsely been investigated in speech tasks, with contradictory results. We considered both the Ne/ERN and Pe following errors in overt speech production with a focus on the importance of auditory feedback, i.e., listening to one’s own voice for error monitoring. In a Stroop color-naming task, participants responded orally while their voices were masked by noise in half of the trials. Our results showed that errors were followed by both an Ne/ERN and a Pe. Importantly, the Pe was reduced for errors in noise-masked trials suggesting that late error monitoring is impaired when auditory feedback cannot be accessed. Exploratory analyses revealed distinct error types that differed regarding the Ne/ERN and Pe. Uncorrected errors elicited only a Pe but no Ne/ERN, whereas partial errors elicited only a Ne/ERN but no Pe. This finding supports the idea that the Ne/ERN and Pe reflect independent monitoring processes and furthermore implies that error corrections may be of particular importance in speech error processing.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Monitoring & inhibitory control