Advances in Understanding the Phenomena and Processing in Audiovisual Speech Perception.

The Special Issue entitled "Advances in Understanding the Phenomena and Processing in Audiovisual Speech Perception" attracted a variety of articles written by prominent authors in the field [...

Investigation of Cross-Language and Stimulus-Dependent Effects on the McGurk Effect with Finnish and Japanese Speakers and Listeners.

In the McGurk effect, perception of a spoken consonant is altered when an auditory (A) syllable is presented with an incongruent visual (V) syllable (e.g., A/pa/V/ka/ is often heard as /ka/ or /ta/).

Exploring body consciousness of dancers, athletes, and lightly physically active adults.

Body consciousness is associated with kinetic skills and various aspects of wellbeing. Physical activities have been shown to contribute to the development of body consciousness. Methodological studies are needed in improving the assessment of body consciousness in adults with distinct physical activity backgrounds.

The Paradox of Fiction Revisited-Improvised Fictional and Real-Life Social Rejections Evoke Associated and Relatively Similar Psychophysiological Responses.

Theatre-based practices, such as improvisation, are frequently applied to simulate everyday social interactions. Although the improvisational context is acknowledged as fictional, realistic emotions may emerge, a phenomenon labelled the 'paradox of fiction'. This study investigated how manipulating the context (real-life versus fictional) modulates psychophysiological reactivity to social rejection during dyadic interactions.

Negative affordance effect: automatic response inhibition triggered by handle orientation of non-target object.

Habituated response tendency associated with affordance of an object is automatically inhibited if this affordance cue is extracted from a non-target object. This study presents two go/no-go experiments investigating whether this response control operates in response selection processes and whether it is linked to conflict-monitoring mechanisms. In the first experiment, the participants performed responses with one hand, and in the second experiment, with two hands.

Haptic recognition memory and lateralisation for verbal and nonverbal shapes.

Laterality effects generally refer to an advantage for verbal processing in the left hemisphere and for non-verbal processing in the right hemisphere, and are often demonstrated in memory tasks in vision and audition. In contrast, their role in haptic memory is less understood. In this study, we examined haptic recognition memory and laterality for letters and nonsense shapes.

Annoyance, perception, and physiological effects of wind turbine infrasound.

Even though some individuals subjectively associate various symptoms with infrasound, there are very few systematic studies on the contribution of infrasound to the perception, annoyance, and physiological reactions elicited by wind turbine sound. In this study, sound samples were selected among long-term measurement data from wind power plant and residential areas, both indoors and outdoors, and used in laboratory experiments. In the experiments, the detectability and annoyance of both inaudible and audible characteristics of wind turbine noise were determined, as well as autonomic nervous system responses: heart rate, heart rate variability, and skin conductance response.

Laterality effects in the haptic discrimination of verbal and non-verbal shapes.

The left hemisphere is known to be generally predominant in verbal processing and the right hemisphere in non-verbal processing. We studied whether verbal and non-verbal lateralization is present in haptics by comparing discrimination performance between letters and nonsense shapes. We addressed stimulus complexity by introducing lower case letters, which are verbally identical with upper case letters but have a more complex shape.

Connecting directional limb movements to vowel fronting and backing.

It has been shown recently that when participants are required to pronounce a vowel at the same time with the hand movement, the vocal and manual responses are facilitated when a front vowel is produced with forward-directed hand movements and a back vowel is produced with backward-directed hand movements. This finding suggests a coupling between spatial programing of articulatory tongue movements and hand movements. The present study revealed that the same effect can be also observed in relation to directional leg movements.

Reaching and grasping with the tongue: Shared motor planning between hand actions and articulatory gestures.

Research has shown connections between articulatory mouth actions and manual actions. This study investigates whether forward-backward hand movements could be associated with vowel production processes that programme tongue fronting/backing, lip rounding/spreading (Experiment 1), and/or consonant production processes that programme tongue tip and tongue dorsum actions (Experiment 2). The participants had to perform either forward or backward hand movement and simultaneously pronounce different vowels or consonants.

Exploring laterality and memory effects in the haptic discrimination of verbal and non-verbal shapes.

The brain's left hemisphere often displays advantages in processing verbal information, while the right hemisphere favours processing non-verbal information. In the haptic domain due to contra-lateral innervations, this functional lateralization is reflected in a hand advantage during certain functions. Findings regarding the hand-hemisphere advantage for haptic information remain contradictory, however.

Stimulus duration has little effect on auditory, visual and audiovisual temporal order judgement.

Some classical studies on temporal order judgments (TOJ) suggested a single central process comparing stimulus onsets across modalities. The prevalent current view suggests that there is modality-specific timing estimation followed by a cross-modal stage. If the latter view is correct, TOJ's may vary depending on stimulus modality.

Semantically Congruent Visual Information Can Improve Auditory Recognition Memory in Older Adults.

In the course of normal aging, memory functions show signs of impairment. Studies of memory in the elderly have previously focused on a single sensory modality, although multisensory encoding has been shown to improve memory performance in children and young adults. In this study, we investigated how audiovisual encoding affects auditory recognition memory in older (mean age 71 years) and younger (mean age 23 years) adults.

Mismatch negativity (MMN) to speech sounds is modulated systematically by manual grip execution.

Manual actions and speech are connected: for example, grip execution can influence simultaneous vocalizations and vice versa. Our previous studies show that the consonant [k] is associated with the power grip and the consonant [t] with the precision grip. Here we studied whether the interaction between speech sounds and grips could operate already at a pre-attentive stage of auditory processing, reflected by the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potential (ERP).

Connections of Grasping and Horizontal Hand Movements with Articulation in Czech Speakers.

We have recently shown in Finnish speakers that articulation of certain vowels and consonants has a systematic influence on simultaneous grasp actions as well as on forward and backward hand movements. Here we studied whether these effects generalize to another language, namely Czech. We reasoned that if the results generalized to another language environment, it would suggest that the effects arise through other processes than language-dependent semantic associations.

Sensory and Emotional Perception of Wooden Surfaces through Fingertip Touch.

Previous studies on tactile experiences have investigated a wide range of material surfaces across various skin sites of the human body in self-touch or other touch modes. Here, we investigate whether the sensory and emotional aspects of touch are related when evaluating wooden surfaces using fingertips in the absence of other sensory modalities. Twenty participants evaluated eight different pine and oak wood surfaces, using sensory and emotional touch descriptors, through the lateral motion of active fingertip exploration.

Lipreading Ability and Its Cognitive Correlates in Typically Developing Children and Children With Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: Lipreading and its cognitive correlates were studied in school-age children with typical language development and delayed language development due to specific language impairment (SLI).

Method: Forty-two children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI were tested by using a word-level lipreading test and an extensive battery of standardized cognitive and linguistic tests.

Results: Children with SLI were poorer lipreaders than their typically developing peers.

Preparation and execution of teeth clenching and foot muscle contraction influence on corticospinal hand-muscle excitability.

Contraction of a muscle modulates not only the corticospinal excitability (CSE) of the contracting muscle but also that of different muscles. We investigated to what extent the CSE of a hand muscle is modulated during preparation and execution of teeth clenching and ipsilateral foot dorsiflexion either separately or in combination. Hand-muscle CSE was estimated based on motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle.

Systematic Influence of Perceived Grasp Shape on Speech Production.

Previous research has shown that precision and power grip performance is consistently influenced by simultaneous articulation. For example, power grip responses are performed relatively fast with the open-back vowel [a], whereas precision grip responses are performed relatively fast with the close-front vowel [i]. In the present study, the participants were presented with a picture of a hand shaped to the precision or power grip.

Sharp and round shapes of seen objects have distinct influences on vowel and consonant articulation.

The shape and size-related sound symbolism phenomena assume that, for example, the vowel [i] and the consonant [t] are associated with sharp-shaped and small-sized objects, whereas [ɑ] and [m] are associated with round and large objects. It has been proposed that these phenomena are mostly based on the involvement of articulatory processes in representing shape and size properties of objects. For example, [i] might be associated with sharp and small objects, because it is produced by a specific front-close shape of articulators.

Interaction in planning vocalizations and grasping.

Previous studies have shown a congruency effect between manual grasping and syllable articulation. For instance, a power grip is associated with syllables whose articulation involves the tongue body and/or large mouth aperture ([kɑ]) whereas a precision grip is associated with articulations that involve the tongue tip and/or small mouth aperture ([ti]). Previously, this effect has been observed in manual reaction times.

Excitability of hand motor areas during articulation of syllables.

It is known that articulating different syllables is linked to different grasp actions, e.g. [ti] is linked to precision grip, and [kɑ] to power grip.

Selective Influences of Precision and Power Grips on Speech Categorization.

Recent studies have shown that articulatory gestures are systematically associated with specific manual grip actions. Here we show that executing such actions can influence performance on a speech-categorization task. Participants watched and/or listened to speech stimuli while executing either a power or a precision grip.

Interaction in planning movement direction for articulatory gestures and manual actions.

Some theories concerning speech mechanisms assume that overlapping representations are involved in programming certain articulatory gestures and hand actions. The present study investigated whether planning of movement direction for articulatory gestures and manual actions could interact. The participants were presented with written vowels (Experiment 1) or syllables (Experiment 2) that were associated with forward or backward movement of tongue (e.

School-aged children can benefit from audiovisual semantic congruency during memory encoding.

Although we live in a multisensory world, children's memory has been usually studied concentrating on only one sensory modality at a time. In this study, we investigated how audiovisual encoding affects recognition memory. Children (n = 114) from three age groups (8, 10 and 12 years) memorized auditory or visual stimuli presented with a semantically congruent, incongruent or non-semantic stimulus in the other modality during encoding.