Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Poster Slams
Speech production facilitates audiovisual word matching
Poster A31 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Natalya Kaganovich1, Jennifer Schumaker; 1Purdue University
Earlier behavioral and neuroimaging studies showed that listening to speech (even when it is auditory-only) activates our own motor representations for speech. We examined whether such engagement of motor representations may, in turn, facilitate audiovisual processing of observed speech. Participants first saw a picture of an everyday object and heard it named (e.g., see toys, hear “toys”). The picture disappeared for 2 seconds, and when it appeared again, participants had to either press a response key as soon as possible (PRESS condition) or say the word that they just heard (SPEAK) condition. They then saw a silent video of a woman producing either the same word (e.g., “toys”) or a word that was visually different – e.g., “bus.” Participants pressed one key if they thought the video matched the previously heard word and another button if they thought it did not. Each participant completed both conditions on two different days. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to silent videos when they were perceived as either congruent or incongruent with preceding auditory words. In both conditions, incongruent videos elicited a larger phonological N400 compared to congruent videos. Importantly, when participants themselves articulated a word prior to observing a silent video, the N400 occurred significantly earlier. The results suggest that activated motor representations for speech facilitate the perception of visually observed speech of others. The findings may serve as a benchmark for understanding the connection between motor and visual representations of speech in disorders with impaired audiovisual processing, such as autism, dyslexia, and developmental language disorder.
Topic Areas: Reading, Phonology