Recalibration from speech imagery

Abstract

The speech-perception system is capable of rapidly adjusting its perceptual boundaries. This adjustment, termed recalibration, is useful for accommodating variations between speakers in how they produce speech sounds. Recalibration is not just induced by speaker variation, but also by certain perceptual illusions, such as the McGurk effect.1 The following experiment tests whether a perceptual illusion induced by speech imagery is also capable of causing recalibration. Speech imagery has recently been shown to induce a perceptual effect similar to the McGurk effect, causing external sounds to be heard as similar to what is being imagined. The similarity between the McGurk effect and the influence of speech imagery motivates this experiment which tests whether, as with the McGurk effect, speech imagery can alter the perceptual boundaries between speech sounds.