Effects of Seeing and Hearing Speech on Speech Production
Poster Presentation

Michelle Jarick
Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University

Jeffery Jones
Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University

     Abstract ID Number: 166
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: September 24, 2006
     Presentation date: 06/20/2006 10:00 AM in Hamilton Building, Foyer
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
Speech is a multimodal event whereby people retrieve phonetic information not only from the auditory speech signal but also from the visual information afforded by the speakers’ face. The revised Motor Theory of speech suggests that we perceive speech by deciphering the underlying intended gestures involved during speech production (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985). Indeed, recent studies have shown that listening and viewing speech excites the tongue and lip motor areas involved in producing speech. We investigated the relationship between speech perception and production using a Stroop-like paradigm. Participants observed video clips of a man producing either /aba/ or /aga/ in three conditions: visual-only, audio-only, and audiovisual. Target letters ‘BA’ or ‘GA’ were flashed over the speakers’ face during the video and participants were asked to identify the target manually or verbally as quickly and accurately as possible. Our results showed that participants were fastest at responding verbally when the target matched the speech stimuli in all modality conditions. Indeed, verbal responses were facilitated by the visual-only matched stimuli and delayed by the mismatched stimuli. Conversely, only the audiovisual stimuli significantly affected manual responses. Our findings suggest that viewing speech might ‘prime’ our motor system for subsequent speech production.