Hearing With Your Face

"How your own face is moving makes a difference in how you 'hear' what you hear," says Takayuki Ito, a senior scientist at Yale University.

The movement of facial skin and muscles around the mouth plays an important role not only in the way the sounds of speech are made, but also in the way they are heard according to a study by scientists at Haskins Laboratories, a Yale University affiliated research laboratory.

Journal reference:
Takayuki Ito, Mark Tiede, and David J. Ostry. Somatosensory function in speech perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009
DOI Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810063106

Some language teachers believe that:

- Language involves the physical interaction between people.

- What you do changes what you hear.

- Seeing faces helps focus the actual communication act and its meaning in context.

- Language is both a whole brain and body activity.

- the brain face eye connection is very complex in humans.

- Visual cues effect hearing.

- One hears someone speaking better when the see the person speak.

- One learns to produce sounds better when seeing them spoken.

Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Exchanging ideas, fostering collaborations, and forging partnerships across the sciences, it produces groundbreaking research that enhances our understanding of - and reveals ways to improve or remediate —speech perception and production, reading and reading disabilities, and human communication.

Link to the Yale University - Haskins Press release
http://www.haskins.yale.edu/newsrelease/HNR_Ostry02.html