Abstract
Research in audiovisual speech perception has demonstrated that sensory factors such as auditory and visual acuity are associated with a listener's ability to extract and combine auditory and visual speech cues. This case study report examined audiovisual integration using a newly developed measure of capacity in a sample of hearing-impaired listeners. Capacity assessments are unique because they examine the contribution of reaction-time (RT) as well as accuracy to determine the extent to which a listener efficiently combines auditory and visual speech cues relative to independent race model predictions. Multisensory speech integration ability was examined in two experiments: an open-set sentence recognition and a closed set speeded-word recognition study that measured capacity. Most germane to our approach, capacity illustrated speed-accuracy tradeoffs that may be predicted by audiometric configuration. Results revealed that some listeners benefit from increased accuracy, but fail to benefit in terms of speed on audiovisual relative to unisensory trials. Conversely, other listeners may not benefit in the accuracy domain but instead show an audiovisual processing time benefit.
Highlights
While a listener’s hearing ability certainly influences language performance, decades of research has revealed that cues obtained from the visual modality affect speech recognition capabilities (e.g., Sumby and Pollack, 1954; McGurk and MacDonald, 1976; Massaro, 2004)
The mean auditory, visual-only and audiovisual accuracy scores and the predicted and obtained AV integration scores are displayed for normal-hearing participants selected from another study (Altieri and Hudock, 2014)
Both listeners yielded gains that were greater than 2.5 standard deviation (SD) from the control participants
Summary
While a listener’s hearing ability certainly influences language performance, decades of research has revealed that cues obtained from the visual modality affect speech recognition capabilities (e.g., Sumby and Pollack, 1954; McGurk and MacDonald, 1976; Massaro, 2004). While high-frequency hearing loss at frequencies greater than 1000 Hz has an adverse effect on auditory-only perceptual abilities, audiovisual perceptual skills appear to be less adversely affected, as noted by Erber (2002, 2003) among others (e.g., Danhauer et al, 1985). This observation is noteworthy considering that a significant proportion of older adults experience a progressive high-frequency hearing loss commonly known as presbycusis. The perception of high-frequency speech sounds, such as fricatives (e.g., / /), is affected to varying degrees
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