Cortical network underlying speech production during delayed auditory feedback

Hearing ones own voice is critical for fluent speech production as it allows for the detection and correction of vocalization errors in real-time. This behavior known as the auditory feedback control of speech is impaired in various neurological disorders ranging from stuttering to aphasia, however the underlying neural mechanisms are still poorly understood. Computational models of speech motor control suggest that, during speech production, the brain uses an efference copy of the motor command to generate an internal estimate of the speech output. When actual feedback differs from this internal estimate, an error signal is generated to correct the estimate and subsequent motor commands to produce intended speech. We were able to localize these neural markers using electrocorticographic recordings from neurosurgical subjects during a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) paradigm. In this task, subjects hear their voice with a time delay as they produced words and sentences (similar to an echo on a conference call), which is well known to disrupt fluency by causing slow and stutter-like speech in humans. We observed a significant response enhancement in auditory cortex that scaled with the duration of feedback delay indicating an auditory speech error signal. Immediately following auditory cortex, dorsal precentral gyrus (dPreCG), a region that has not been implicated in auditory feedback processing before, exhibited a markedly similar response enhancement suggesting a tight coupling between the two regions. Critically, response enhancement in dPreCG occurred only when subjects profoundly slowed down their speech during articulation of long utterances due to a continuous mismatch between produced speech and reafferent feedback. These results suggest that dPreCG plays an essential role in updating the internal speech estimates to maintain fluency as well as coordinating the efference copy and auditory error signals during speech production.