title: Audio-visual speech perception is special.
abstract: In face-to-face conversation speech is perceived by ear and eye. We studied the prerequisites of audio-visual speech perception by using perceptually ambiguous sine wave replicas of natural speech as auditory stimuli. When the subjects were not aware that the auditory stimuli were speech, they showed only negligible integration of auditory and visual stimuli. When the same subjects learned to perceive the same auditory stimuli as speech, they integrated the auditory and visual stimuli in a similar manner as natural speech. These results demonstrate the existence of a multisensory speech-specific mode of perception.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Computational Engineering, University of Technology, P.O. Box 3000, FIN-02015 Helsinki, Finland. jyrtuoma@utu.fi
authors.forename: Jyrki
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tuomainen
authors.forename: Tobias S
authors.initials: TS
authors.lastname: Andersen
authors.forename: Kaisa
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tiippana
authors.forename: Mikko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sams
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D008085:Lipreading; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception