Bimodal audio-visual training enhances auditory adaptation process

Effects of auditory training with bimodal audio-visual stimuli on monomodal aural speech intelligibility were examined in individuals with normal hearing using highly degraded noise-vocoded speech sound. Visual cue simultaneously presented with auditory stimuli during the training session significantly improved auditory speech intelligibility not only for words used in the training session, but also untrained words, when compared with the auditory training using only auditory stimuli. Visual information is generally considered to complement insufficient speech information conveyed by the auditory system during audio-visual speech perception. However, the present results showed another beneficial effect of audio-visual training that the visual cue enhances the auditory adaptation process to the degraded new speech sound, which is different from those given during bimodal training. NeuroReport 20:1231-1234 (C) 2009 Wolters Kluwer Health vertical bar Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.