Proprioception and the McGurk effect.

Abstract

The report “Sensorimotor adaptation in speech production” by J. F. Houde and M. I. Jordan (20 Feb., p. [1213][1]) demonstrates that people adjust their speech production to compensate for acoustic feedback alteration. The fact that most of the study volunteers compensated incompletely for the acoustic changes, taken together with the fact that the volunteers were unaware that feedback was being altered, indicates a significant discovery not mentioned in the original report: a “proprioceptive McGurk effect” on the perception of one's own speech. The well-known McGurk effect is the phenomenon of altered phonetic perception induced by the simultaneous experience of conflicting auditory and visual information ([1][2]). For example, hearing “ba” while viewing the mouth of a speaker saying “ga” causes one to perceive “da.” Houde and Jordan's experiment illustrates an analogous effect in which the conflicting information is not visual, but proprioceptive. For example, in the condition in which the sound [e] was shifted toward [i], a volunteer intending to say “pep” produced an utterance similar to “pap” and received acoustic feedback approximating “pip,” but nevertheless perceived “pep.” The articulatory proprioceptive feedback was inconsistent with the auditory feedback, and a percept intermediate (in F1, F2 formant space) between the two types of feedback resulted. While the McGurk effect has been a widely used tool in investigating multimodal integration processes, it has heretofore been limited to the interaction between visual and auditory modalities. The real-time acoustic feedback alteration paradigm of Houde and Jordan expands this useful tool to the proprioceptive modality. 1. [↵][3]1. H. McGurk, 2. J. MacDonald , Nature 264, 746 (1976). [OpenUrl][4][CrossRef][5][PubMed][6][Web of Science][7] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.279.5354.1213 [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [4]: {openurl}?query=rft.jtitle%253DNature%26rft.stitle%253DNature%26rft.aulast%253DMcGurk%26rft.auinit1%253DH.%26rft.volume%253D264%26rft.issue%253D5588%26rft.spage%253D746%26rft.epage%253D748%26rft.atitle%253DHearing%2Blips%2Band%2Bseeing%2Bvoices.%26rft_id%253Dinfo%253Adoi%252F10.1038%252F264746a0%26rft_id%253Dinfo%253Apmid%252F1012311%26rft.genre%253Darticle%26rft_val_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Ajournal%26ctx_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ctx_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Actx [5]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=10.1038/264746a0&link_type=DOI [6]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=1012311&link_type=MED&atom=%2Fsci%2F282%2F5396%2F1991.8.atom [7]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=A1976CQ45400031&link_type=ISI