Adaptation

Spoken language is constantly undergoing change: Speakers within and across social and regional groups influence each other’s speech, leading to the emergence and drifts of accents in a language and ultimately to sound change. These processes are driven by mutual unintentional imitation of the phonetic details of others' speech in conversational interactions, suggesting that continuous auditory-motor adaptation takes place in interactive language use and plasticity of auditory-motor representations of speech persists across the lifespan. The brain mechanisms underlying this large-scale social-linguistic behaviour are still poorly understood. This projct aims to investigate the role of cerebellar and striatal dysfunctions in unintended adaptation to the speech rhythm and articulation rate of a second speaker. The study was approved by the ethical committees of the Essen University Hospital (15-6573-BO) and the University of Munich (129-14)