| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,840,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥1,040,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research project was to examine developmental changes in integrating auditory (voice)and visual (face) information about speech. In face-to-face speech communication, it is known that people utilize visual articulating information for perceiving speech with a process of multimodal integration of auditory and visual cues. It was hypothesized that weighting of auditory and visual cues in the integration process is modified according to the individual's characteristics of sensory processing of unimodal information, thus, younger children with poor lipreading ability would depend on audition more and the elderly with age-related deterioration of hearing would depend on vision more. In this project, older people were focused on. Older (60 years to 65 years) and young (around 20 years) participants, both with normal hearing and normal or corrected to normal vision, were compared on auditory-visual speech perception. Older people were influenced by visual information more than the young when compared at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) where auditory-only hearing was 90% correct. Separately, each participant's hearing level was measured. The older group's threshold was significantly higher than the young, indicating some deterioration due to aging.
The next experiment was intended to measure reaction time (RT). To do so, a calibration was conducted for the hearing deterioration, thus, the older group was presented auditory speech at higher SNR by 4 dB. The results showed that even after auditory calibration, the older group used the visual cues more than the young. Moreover, RTs revealed that the older people process auditory cues more slowly than the young whereas the two groups were almost equally fast in processing visual cues. It was discussed that the slowed auditory processing of the old leads to greater possibility of the influence of the visual cues.
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