Ayoub Daliri
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Neuroscience
Talking fluently depends on a kind of prediction. As the brain prepares the movements of the lips, tongue, and larynx, it also predicts what those movements should sound like, and primes the auditory system to compare that prediction against the voice it actually hears.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
stuttering
speech fluency disorder
speech motor control
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Evaluate how exposure to auditory errors alters predictive sensorimotor processes in children and adults who stutter, using behavioral and neurophysiological recordings to test whether stuttering involves inaccurate speech predictions across the lifespan.
- Characterize how speech predictions and incoming auditory feedback are aligned in time, by delaying auditory feedback or delaying speech initiation in people who stutter and in fluent speakers.
- Determine the functional contribution of the speech premotor cortex to predictive sensorimotor processes, using neurostimulation during speech tasks.
- Test whether training people to detect and estimate auditory errors more accurately, using visual feedback together with auditory feedback perturbation, improves subsequent speech motor learning in healthy adults.
- Determine how auditory-to-motor mapping contributes to speech motor learning, by using visual feedback to train participants on the link between articulatory configurations and their auditory consequences, then measuring the extent of learning.
More about the research
When prediction and feedback line up, speech runs smoothly; when they do not, the brain registers an error and adjusts. Both projects in this lab examine these predictive and error-detection processes - one asking how they break down in stuttering, the other asking whether they can be trained to make speech motor learning more effective. Together they aim to connect a mechanistic account of speech monitoring to the design of better treatments for speech disorders.
Why it matters
Stuttering and other speech disorders reduce quality of life and limit school, work, and social participation, and current treatments are long, costly, variable in outcome, and prone to relapse, especially for people with fewer resources. Pinpointing which predictive speech processes are deficient, and showing that error detection and auditory-to-motor mapping can be trained, could provide concrete targets for shorter, more reliable neural and behavioral therapies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kwang Kim
Purdue University, IN·Neuroscience
Train and validate machine learning classifiers that predict upcoming stuttering moments from electroencephalography (EEG), brain-wave recordings, collected while adults who stutter are speaking.
Ratree Wayland
University of Florida, FL·Psychology
Test whether listening training with immediate feedback plus speaking practice improves articulatory coordination of novel consonant clusters more than speaking practice alone, in a two-group training study.
David Ostry
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience
Test whether auditory, somatosensory or motor cortex is causally needed to retain newly learned speech movements by suppressing each area with continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) after learning.
The school
Arizona State University Campus Immersion: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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