Mystifying the Senses: Bimodal Speech Perception :: Biology Essays Research Papers

vex the Senses Bimodal Speech Perception My grand receive, like many elderly people, suffers from earreach loss. Recently however, she has begun to lose her sight as well. Curiously enough, though her take of auditory impairment remains the same since macular degeneration has claimed her ability to see, her audition seems to have deteriorated further. Could this be simply the result of alienation because of the loss of a further sense? This situation led me to wonder about my throw hearing ability. I have often experienced hearing clog in settings where I cannot see the person who is talking to me-in a motion-picture show theater, or over the teleph ane. The questions raised here call into question the ceremonious notion of sensory processing. Distinctive inputs are received by their several(prenominal) processing organ and the end result is relayed to the brain. How then can we let off a seeming reliance of two different sensory percepts on each other? Is at that place mo re to hearing than our ears? Historically, scientific establish for the existence of sensory integration has long existed, but the first testis theory developed to this effect was stumbled upon by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald of the University of Surrey (1). The scientists were heterogeneous in a study of how infants perceive speech by contend a video of a mother talking in one place and playing the sound of her voice in another place. They helter-skelter began to play with the consequences of dubbing an particular audio sound onto the video of the mother saying a different sound (2). They found that when the auditory syllable, ba-ba was enforce on the optic syllable ga-ga, da-da was hear. The same occurred when the audio and visual syllables were reversed. Also, pa-pa dubbed on ka-ka was heard as ta-ta. When one of the sensory inputs was eliminated by closing the eyes, or plugging the ears, the condition syllable was identified (2). McGurk and McDonald found Contemporary, auditory-based theories of speech perception...inadequate to accommodate these new observations and concluded that there must be some allowance made for the influence of the visual on hearing (2). The conventional theory of the senses is challenged. So, speech perception is bimodal. Of course, as science repeatedly shows, nothing is simple as that. The question remains, how does this integration occur? When does it occur? What neurological systems are involved? It has become in general accepted that audio and visual inputs are received by item-by-item organs (the ears and eyes) and that integration occurs sometime after these two systems have elegant the input.