Speech through the Ear, the Eye, the Mouth and the Hand

This chapter aims at describing how speech is multimodal not only in its perception but also in its production. It first focuses on multimodal perception of speech segments and speech prosody. It describes how multimodal perception is linked to speech production and explains why we consider speech perception as a sensory-motor process. It then analyses some aspects of hand-mouth coordination in spoken communication. Input from evolutionary perspectives, ontogenesis and behavioral studies on infants and adults are combined to detail how and why this coordination is crucial in speech.