Work

Learning to use an artificial visual cue in speech identification

Year: 2010

Type: article

Abstract: Visual information from a speaker's face profoundly influences auditory perception of speech. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which visual influences may depend on experience, and extent to which new sources of visual speech information can be incorporated in speech perception. In the current study, participants were trained on completely novel visual cues for phonetic categories. Participants learned to accurately identify phonetic categories based on novel visual cues. These newly-learned visual cues influenced identification responses to auditory speech stimuli, but not to the same extent as visual cues from a speaker's face. The novel methods and results of the current study raise theoretical questions about the nature of information integration in speech perception, and open up possibilities for further research on learning in multimodal perception, which may have applications in improving speech comprehension among the hearing-impaired.

Source: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

DOI: 10.1121/1.3479537

Authors: Joseph D. W. Stephens, Lori L. Holt

Institutions: Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University

Language: English

Topic: Multisensory perception and integration

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Science Foundation, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

Awards: Formation and Tuning of Complex Auditory Categories, Learning in audio-visual integration of speech, Learning Complex Auditory Categories