Processing of changes in visual speech in the human auditory cortex

R. Möttönen, Christina Krause, Kaisa Tiippana, M. Sams

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

Seeing a talker’s articulatory gestures may affect the observer’s auditory speech percept. Observing congruent articulatory gestures may enhance the recognition of speech sounds [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 26 (1954) 212], whereas observing incongruent gestures may change the auditory percept phonetically as occurs in the McGurk effect [Nature 264 (1976) 746]. For example, simultaneous acoustic /ba/ and visual /ga/ are usually heard as /da/. We studied cortical processing of occasional changes in audiovisual and visual speech stimuli with magnetoencephalography. In the audiovisual experiment congruent (acoustic /iti/, visual /iti/) and incongruent (acoustic /ipi/, visual /iti/) audiovisual stimuli, which were both perceived as /iti/, were presented among congruent /ipi/ (acoustic /ipi/, visual /ipi/) stimuli. In the visual experiment only the visual components of these stimuli were presented. A visual change both in audiovisual and visual experiments activated supratemporal auditory cortices bilaterally. The auditory cortex activation to a visual change occurred later in the visual than in the audiovisual experiment, suggesting that interaction between modalities accelerates the detection of visual change in speech.
Original languageEnglish
JournalCognitive brain research
Volume13
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)417-425
Number of pages9
ISSN0926-6410
Publication statusPublished - 2002
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Fields of Science

  • 515 Psychology

Cite this