Background

What if you said one thing but heard yourself saying something else? Would you notice this, or would you perhaps believe you said the thing that you in fact only heard? When we speak, do we always know exactly what we are going to say, before we say it, and use feedback only to make sure we actually said the thing we planned to say? Or are our speech plans much more vague and introspectively opaque than that. And if they are, do we use auditory feedback to know what we are saying?

These questions tap into crucial human issues about what it means to communicate with language, and to attempt to explore them, we developed RSE. RSE allows the experimenter to covertly record words that the participant is saying while speaking through a sound isolating headset, and then selectively insert these recordings into their auditory feedback, while simultaneously blocking the feedback of what they are actually saying, thereby creating a situation where they say one thing, but hear themselves saying something else.

In previous experiments, we have explored how speakers react to such voice exchanges, and found that speakers often believe they have said the word that was inserted, rather than the word they actually said (Lind et al., 2014a). This suggests three interlinked things: (1) that speech planning is not a precise activity involving fixed pre-linguistic contents, but that planning is vague and imprecise, and intrinsically context-bound; (2) that we use auditory feedback not only to monitor for speech errors, but primarily to specify, for ourselves, the full meaning of what we are saying, in much the same way that we do when listening to and interpreting words spoken by others. We have called this self-comprehension (Lind et al., 2014b); (3) that our sense of agency over our utterances are not, as is usually assumed, determined by a comparison between our prediction of the outcome and the actual outcome but that it has a strong inferential component.

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