People rely on their hearing to know what they're saying

Researchers have said that auditory feedback plays an important role in helping us determine what we're saying as we speak.

Researcher Andreas Lind of Lund University, lead author of the study, said their results indicate that speakers listen to their own voices to help specify the meaning of what they are saying.

Lind explained that these findings suggest that the meaning of an utterance is not entirely internal to the speaker, but that it is also determined by the feedback they receive from their utterances, and from the inferences they draw from the wider conversational context.

For the study, Lind and colleagues recruited Swedish participants to complete a classic Stroop test, which provided a controlled linguistic setting.

During the Stroop test, participants were presented with various color words (e.g., "red" or "green") one at a time on a screen and were tasked with naming the color of the font that each word was printed in, rather than the color that the word itself signified.

The participants wore headphones that provided real-time auditory feedback as they took the test - unbeknownst to them, the researchers had rigged the feedback using a voice-triggered playback system.

Data from the 78 participants indicated that when the timing of the insertions was right, only about one third of the exchanges were detected.

On many of the non-detected trials, when asked to report what they had said, participants reported the word they had heard through feedback, rather than the word they had actually said.

Because accuracy on the task was actually very high, the manipulated feedback effectively led participants to believe that they had made an error and said the wrong word.

The study has been published in the journal Psychological Science.