Speech misperception: speaking and seeing interfere differently with hearing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience
• Speech Communication

Background:

• Speech perception is linked to speech motor production, mediating multimodal integration.
• Direct coupling between articulatory movement and auditory perception remains understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the dissociation between self-produced speech actions and observed speech movements on auditory phoneme perception.
• To determine if articulatory effects on speech perception are articulator-specific.

Main Methods:

• Assessed intelligibility of syllables [pa], [ta], [ka] under conditions of silent self-articulation (congruent/incongruent) and observation of another's articulation.
• Compared effects of self-articulation versus visual speech perception.

Main Results:

• Self-articulating [ka] or [ta] degraded perception of heard [ta] and [ka] (same primary articulator: tongue).
• Self-articulating [pa] did not affect perception of heard [ta] or [ka] (different primary articulator: lips).
• Watching [pa] production degraded perception of heard [ta] and [ka].

Conclusions:

• Articulatory distortion of speech perception is articulator-specific.
• Visually induced distortion is not articulator-specific.
• Speech motor processing directly contributes to auditory speech perception.