Individual differences in auditory-motor synchronization to speech: extending results from English-and German-to a Norwegian-speaking population

摘要: It has previously been found that the ability to synchronize one’s own speech to a string of syllables at the average cross-language rate of 4.5 syllables/sec, is not uniformly distributed1 in the population. In fact, when performing a simple 1-minute test, participants’ ability to synchronize to the speech-proxy seems to be bimodally distributed, rendering participants as members of one out of two groups (so-called high or low synchronizers). High synchronizers better align their utterances to the stimulus as compared to lows, measured as phase-locking between the perceived and produced signals. Interestingly, high synchronizers display increased neural synchrony between motor and sensory regions of the language network in the brain, as compared to low synchronizers. The functional differences between the groups are likely to be supported by the underlying neural structure (s), namely increased white matter in areas connecting these two regions1. Importantly, the individual neural differences associated with the high and low synchronizers are also evident in ecologically relevant behavioral tasks, such as statistical word-learning1, syllable detection2 and rate discrimination3. As these neural differences in auditory-motor coupling, relevant for language processing and learning, can be assessed by a short and simple behavioral test (the spontaneous synchronization to speech, SSS,-test), exploring the limits of the test and, thus, its usefulness as an experimental tool, is of importance. Up to this point, the bimodal distribution in synchronization ability has only been observed for native English1, 4–6-and Germanspeakers2, 3, 7.Given the …