"Mono-sensing" and Understanding Speech

by Dora Raymaker · 2009-02-12 17:00:00 UTC
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Read my lips: Using multiple senses in speech perception reports on an article "Speech Perception as a Multimodal Phenomenon" (Current Directions in Psychological Science Volume 17, Issue 6, Date: December 2008, Pages: 405-409 Lawrence D. Rosenblum). The article discusses how comprehension of spoken word is likely something that requires input from more senses than just hearing; vision, and even touch may play a large role in how most people make sense of spoken word.

Take a gander at the instructive video below (not captioned, but the phenomena the video captures is described in the link to the report above).

What did you think the person was saying? Did you get it correctly, or were you fooled by the "auditory illusion?"

While it's not part of the criteria for any ASD, many people on the spectrum (myself very much in this category) report difficulty processing more than one sensory channel at a time. Understanding sound and image at the same time is in fact so hard for me that I use closed captioning when I watch movies and television shows--I can process just the visual and let go of any attempt to make sense of the audio. And believe me, I have much more acute hearing than I'd really like... When I have to understand what people are saying, even in a quiet setting where I can separate their voices easily from background sounds, I have to "turn off" my vision and all other senses in order to process the word-sounds at all.

When I watched the video, I was not fooled by the illusion. Perhaps because, even with eyes open, I was not seeing (in the sense of processing the visual stimulus) the person's mouth move. Did this happen to anyone else who has "mono-processing" with their senses?

If understanding speech is indeed how Rosenblum describes--a multimodal experience--what might that mean in terms of an explanation for why some people on the spectrum have difficulty understanding or keeping up with spoken language?

Dora Raymaker
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