Aerotactile Integration from Distal Skin Stimuli

Abstract

Tactile sensations at extreme distal body locations can integrate with auditory information to alter speech perception among uninformed and untrained listeners. Inaudible air puffs were applied to participants' ankles, simultaneously with audible syllables having aspirated and unaspirated stop onsets. Syllables heard simultaneously with air puffs were more likely to be heard as aspirated. These results demonstrate that event-appropriate information from distal parts of the body integrates in speech perception, even without frequent or robust location-specific experience. In addition, overall performance was significantly better for those with hair on their ankles, which suggests that the presence of hair may help establish signal relevance, and so aid in multi-modal speech perception.

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

“…As we described earlier in this paper, adults show McGurk percepts analogous to those found with AV speech when perceiving the consonant of audio-haptic (perceiver’s fingers resting on an unseen talker’s lips: Fowler & Dekle, 1991) or audio-tactile (air puff onto perceiver’s skin: Derrick & Gick, 2013; Gick & Derrick, 2009; Gick, Ikegami & Derrick, 2010) target items in which the haptic/tactile event is synchronized with a phonetically incongruous audio speech stimulus. These findings converge with the AV findings to support the premise that the commonality that perceivers detect among the disparate modalities of a given utterance is that all were shaped by a singular articulatory event.…”

“…However, as we noted early on in this paper, infants acquire language largely in face-to-face interactions, which provide a multimodal complex of dynamic visual-facial (talking face), kinesthetic-proprioceptive (self-production) and haptic/tactile information (touching the caregiver’s talking face, feeling the breath of her aspirated consonants), in addition to acoustic consequences of the caregiver’s speech, all of which are highly inter-correlated over time. For example, there is evidence that adults automatically integrate haptic/tactile speech information with auditory information when perceiving consonants (Derrick & Gick, 2013; Fowler & Dekle, 1991; Gick & Derrick, 2009). …”

Perceptual Organization and Lawful Specification

“…To take one of the more charming examples, consider a pair of studies on the topic of voicing in obstruent consonants (Derrick & Gick, 2013; Gick & Derrick, 2009). In American English, the dominant acoustic property conveying voicing is the presence or absence of aspiration (Lotz, Abramson, Gerstman, Ingemann & Nemser, 1960).…”

“…Yet, according to the premises of conjoint lawful specification, an acoustic pattern at the ear and an air current at the neck or hand might well be joint consequences of the same event, and readily combined in multimodal sensory sampling. A succeeding study (Derrick & Gick, 2013) relieves this uncertainty while introducing a new problem.…”

“…For Derrick and Gick (2013), this lack of familiarity was accomplished by running the latex hose that delivered the puff of air down to the participant's ankle; it was guaranteed to create an unfamiliar experience for any subject who spends little time with a talkative podiatrist. Under those circumstances, an acoustic-plus-tactile combination satisfied the condition of unfamiliar presentation that Fowler and Dekle had described.…”