In this paper we review research by us and others on the development of auditory-visual speech perception in order to draw out issues of interest, pinpoint unanswered questions, and highlight future research directions. Studies using the McGurk Effect have shown that Japanese adults use visual speech information less than do English language adults. Infants perceive the McGurk Effect, and for E...

Background: The ability to communicate using speech is a remarkable skill, which requires precise coordination of articulatory movements and decoding of complex acoustic signals. According to the traditional view, speech production and perception rely on motor and auditory brain areas, respectively. However, there is growing evidence that auditory-motor circuits support both speech production a...

Functional imaging techniques, such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), have enabled neuroscientists to elaborate how the human brain solves the formidable problem of decoding the speech signal. In this paper I will outline the properties of primate auditory cortex, and use this as an anatomical framework to address the data from functional imagi...

Seeing the articulatory gestures of the speaker significantly enhances speech perception. Findings from recent neuroimaging studies suggest that activation of the speech motor system during lipreading enhance speech perception by tuning, in a top-down fashion, speech-sound processing in the superior aspects of the posterior temporal lobe. Anatomically, the superior-posterior temporal lobe areas...

Neural responses to unfamiliar non-native phonemes varying in the extent to which they can be articulated were studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Both superior temporal (auditory) and precentral (motor) areas were activated by passive speech perception, and both distinguished non-native from native phonemes, with greater signal change in response to non-native phonemes. ...

Musicians have increased resilience to the effects of noise on speech perception and its neural underpinnings. We do not know, however, how early in life these enhancements arise. We compared auditory brainstem responses to speech in noise in 32 preschool children, half of whom were engaged in music training. Thirteen children returned for testing one year later, permitting the first longitudin...

Auditory processing impairments negatively impact language learning, the ability to listen effectively in noisy environments, and the development of reading skills. Behavioral assessments of auditory processing provide valuable insight into auditory function but lack information about the biological health of the auditory pathway, and can be complicated by comorbid disorders, alertness, and mot...

Speech perception is inherently multimodal. Visual speech (lip-reading) information is used by all perceivers and readily integrates with auditory speech. Imaging research suggests that the brain treats auditory and visual speech similarly. These findings have led some researchers to consider that speech perception works by extracting amodal information that takes the same form across modalitie...

How does a listener find and follow the speech of a talker? Many classic and contemporary accounts of speech perception start with a coherent sensory sample of speech already established, as if the perceptual world consisted solely of speech, and as if no more than a single talker ever spoke at once. Long-established and recent characterizations alike have cast the fundamental problem of speech...

One view of speech perception is that acoustic signals are transformed into representations for pattern matching to determine linguistic structure. This process can be taken as a statistical pattern-matching problem, assuming realtively stable linguistic categories are characterized by neural representations related to auditory properties of speech that can be compared to speech input. This kin...