Caveat Emptor: The Meaning of Perception and Integration in Speech Perception

A recent letter to the journal Nature claimed integration of auditory and tactile information in speech perception. Although multisensory integration of auditory and visible speech has been repeatedly documented, neither perception nor integration was sufficiently formalized, operationalized, and tested to support this claim about auditory and tactile information. In a recent letter to the journal Nature by Gick and Derrick (2009) called AeroTactile Integration in Speech Perception, the authors concluded that “perceivers integrate naturalistic tactile information during auditory speech perception without previous training.” This conclusion was made based on their findings that inaudible air puffs on the skin increased the accuracy of distinguishing between speech sounds that differed in aspiration (/p/ versus /b/ and /t/ versus /d/) (Derrick, Anderson, Gick, & Green, (2009). Notwithstanding the fact that the integration of audible and visible information has been repeatedly and conclusively demonstrated (Massaro, 1998), this note questions the authors’ conclusion that “These results demonstrate that perceivers 1 Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Electronic mail: [email protected]. Submitted to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America