Audiovisual speech perception in children: Neurophysiologic underpinnings
Poster

Erin Hayes
Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern Univversity

Trent Nicol
Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University

Nina Kraus
Communication Sciences and Disorders; Neurobiology and Physiology; Otolaryngology, Northwestern University

     Abstract ID Number: 116
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: May 20, 2003

Abstract
t£?AQ| of this study is to characterize the relationships between audiovisual speech perception and the underlying neurophysiology in children (9-13 years old). Perceptual and neurophysiologic data are simultaneously collected from children while they are presented with auditory, visual, and bimodal speech. The stimuli are naturally produced /di/, /bi/ and /gi/ (Bernstein L.E., 1991). Auditory stimuli are presented in free field in quiet and background noise, and visual stimuli are synchronously presented on a computer monitor. Children are instructed to press a button for /di/, /gi/, or /bi/ as quickly as they can to indicate what they hear. Auditory, visual and audiovisual evoked potential responses are sorted by the perceptual response for each trial paradigm: "enhancement" and "McGurk". Enhancement is a measure of interaction of congruent audiovisual stimuli compared to auditory- and visual-alone stimuli. The McGurk measure is a similar comparison for an incongruent audio-visual pairing. The relationships between perception, reaction time and neurophysiology of the stimuli are characterized. Furthermore, relationships between the neurophysiologic responses and a previously developed battery of psychophysical and brainstem and cortical neurophysiology are examined for each individual child (Kraus, N. et al., 1999). This research is supported by NIH 5T32-DC00015-20.