No abstract

Recent magneto-encephalographic and electro-encephalographic studies provide evidence for cross-modal integration during audio-visual and audio-haptic speech perception, with speech gestures viewed or felt from manual tactile contact with the speaker’s face. Given the temporal precedence of the haptic and visual signals on the acoustic signal in these studies, the observed modulation of N1/P2 auditory evoked responses during bimodal compared to unimodal speech perception suggest that relevant and predictive visual and haptic cues may facilitate auditory speech processing. To further investigate this hypothesis, auditory evoked potentials were here compared during auditory-only, audio-visual and audio-haptic speech perception in live dyadic interactions between a listener and a speaker. In line with previous studies, auditory evoked potentials were attenuated and speeded up during both audio-haptic and audio-visual compared to auditory speech perception. Importantly, the observed latency and amplitude reduction did not significantly depend on the degree of visual and haptic recognition of the speech targets. Altogether, these results further demonstrate cross-modal interactions between the auditory, visual and haptic speech signals. Although they do not contradict the hypothesis that visual and haptic sensory inputs convey predictive information with respect to the incoming auditory speech input, these results suggest that, at least in live conversational interactions, systematic conclusions on sensory predictability in bimodal speech integration have to be taken with caution, with the extraction of predictive cues likely depending on the variability of the speech stimuli.

Abstract■ Action recognition has been found to rely not only on sensory brain areas but also partly on the observer's motor system. However, whether distinct auditory and visual experiences of an action modulate sensorimotor activity remains largely unknown. In the present sparse sampling fMRI study, we determined to which extent sensory and motor representations interact during the perception of tongue and lip speech actions. Tongue and lip speech actions were selected because tongue movements of our interlocutor are accessible via their impact on speech acoustics but not visible because of its position inside the vocal tract, whereas lip movements are both "audible" and visible. Participants were presented with auditory, visual, and audiovisual speech actions, with the visual inputs related to either a sagittal view of the tongue movements or a facial view of the lip movements of a speaker, previously recorded by an ultrasound imaging system and a video camera. Although the neural networks involved in visual visuo-lingual and visuo-facial perception largely overlapped, stronger motor and somatosensory activations were observed during visuo-lingual perception. In contrast, stronger activity was found in auditory and visual cortices during visuo-facial perception. Complementing these findings, activity in the left premotor cortex and in visual brain areas was found to correlate with visual recognition scores observed for visuo-lingual and visuo-facial speech stimuli, respectively, whereas visual activity correlated with RTs for both stimuli. These results suggest that unimodal and multimodal processing of lip and tongue speech actions rely on common sensorimotor brain areas. They also suggest that visual processing of audible but not visible movements induces motor and visual mental simulation of the perceived actions to facilitate recognition and/or to learn the association between auditory and visual signals. ■