Hearing through the skin - Article
New Canadian Research is Amazing
Expanded Understanding of Hearing
Breaking Research
Evidence that we use both eyes and ears to hear has been around since the mid 1970s, now a new Canadian study out of the University of British Columbia finds that inaudible puffs of air delivered along with certain sounds has an influence on what subjects thought they were hearing.
According to associate professor of linguistics Bryan Gick and graduate student Donald Derrick, audio and visual clues are just part of the story as tactile sensation also affect how sound is heard. The work appears in the November 26, 2009 issue of the journal Nature.
Strange to think we may actually hear with our skin.
Science already knows that visual clues that come from a speaker's face can enhance (or interfere) with how you hear what's being said to you. Normally when we say words with the letters "p", "t" and "k" we produce a puff of air (so small its rarely felt or noticed), and this is another clue that lets the listener tell the difference between words with these letters fromt hose with similar sounding letters like "b", "d" and "g".
For the current work, the team compared sounds accompanied by a small inaudible breath of air - sounds such as "pa" and "ta" while also using sounds that aren't (such as "ba" and "da").
At the same moment they heard the recorded sounds, the subjects were either given, or not, a small puff of air to the neck or the back of the hand.
Researchers noticed that "ba" and "da" (known as unaspirated sounds) were heard as the aspirated equals "pa" and "ta" when accompanied by the puff of air.
It's the air that distinguished the sounds, and though we're used to the hearing side, we're not used to feeling that puff of air on our skin.
This is what suggests to researchers that people use tactile sensory information along with other cues to figure out what is being said to them.
Getting a sense of a full picture of how sound is built might prove helpful in the development of communication aids for the hearing impaired. In fact, Dr. Gick, the leader of the study, plans to work on developing a hearing aid that incorporates these findings. "All we need is a pneumatic device that can produce air puffs aimed at the neck at the right times based on acoustic input into the hearing aid, and then a set of experiments to test the efficacy."
The idea that a small puff of air on the skin could help the hearing impaired distinguish consonants like "b" and "p" or "t" and "d" that have the same lip pattern fascinated researchers. If more work shows the same effect is seen when listening to everyday speech, then it really could help create better hearing aids.
It's also quite intriguing that our brains can be affected by a puff of air that most don't hear and few of us realize we produce when speaking. Funny how our complex brains can be fooled by something as simple, as weightless and unseen as a whiff of air.
We know that the eyes can fool the ears due to a particular phenomenon called the McGuirk Effect, where subjects can be fooled into thinking they're hearing "da" when they're truly hearing "ba" as they see a face mouthing the syllable "ga".
One theory that might explain this illusion is that the brain goes through a lifetime of learning to put together sound and visual information to understand the spoken word - getting fooled when the information doesn't match, as we see with the McGuirk Effect.
The research suggests that this integration of different senses in speech may not be something people learn though experience, but that an entirely different processes may be going on.
This article is courtesy of
Kirsten Whittaker
Daily Health Bulletin Editor
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