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Helpful Hints on Reaction Paper No. 1LING 353, Fall 2014

You are being asked to give a reaction to Carol A. Fowler and Dawn J. Dekle, Listening with Eyeand Hand: Cross-Modal Contributions to Speech Perception, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1991, Vol. 17, No. 3, 816-828. [Availableon Moodle.]

Please provide yourpaperbyOctober14, 2014,preferablyelectronically(mark.hale@concordia.ca).It should not be more than 5 pages long, and it should not be less than 3 pages long.

This document contains two kinds of information: rst, some notes on the early part of thereading to get youstarted on the right food, which you may want to keep open beside you as you

read through the early part of the paper, in case they help you to interpret what is being said.Second, some questions that youmight want to think about/respond to in your reaction paper(though you may certainly choose to focus on other parts).

I. Some Notes on Fowler & Dekle (1991)

pg. 1 The term cross-modal appears in the title, and regularly throughout the paper. The wayshumans have of receiving sensory input aresometimes called modes of perception (thus,an olfactory mode, for smell, a tactile or haptic mode, for touch, and optical mode, for vi-sion, an auditory mode, for hearing, and a mode for taste). Modal means, in this context,relating to the mode of perception, and cross-modal means involving more than onemode of perception.

pg. 1 orthographic means written, relating to the writing system.

pg. 1 Here and throughout the authors use haptic to mean relating to touch.

pg. 1 . . . the cross-modal in uence is not phenomenally due to hearing one utterance, seeinganother. . . Theword phenomenally in this contextmeans as experienced bythesubject.The authorsare saying that the subject do not feel that they are hearing one utterance andseeing another, but rather that they feel they are experiencing whatever they report.

pg. 2 Perceptual systems do so by extracting information about properties of the environment

from media suchas light, skin, andair. Here media isbeing usedas thepluralof medium,and medium means the substance through which something is transmitted.

pg. 2 A few lines later palpated means sensed by touch.

pg. 3 The Tadoma method is a method of communication used by dea lind individuals, in which the dea lind person places their thumb on the speakers lips and their ngers alongthe jawline. [Wikipedia]

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II. Some Guidance on the Reaction Paper

The idea of the reaction paper is to have you think about the paper in light of the issues wehave been discussing so far in the course. Here are some things that you could pay attention to

and think about (some, all, or none of them), and give me your reaction to. Of course, this is notobligatoryyoumay discussingin your reaction paper whatever youthink is mostclass-relevantand interesting about the paper youre reading.

Ingeneral, somewhere inyour paper youshouldspendsometime (perhapsa paragraphfor each)summarizing what they did in each experiment (there were 3 in total) and what the results were, in your own words. Before they go into the experiments they start with some big pic-ture issuesthis discussion should tell you what they expected to nd, and why they thoughtit worthwhile trying to nd out whether their expectations were correct or not. You might sum-marize that discussion, again using your own words. After they report on the experiments, they return to the big picture, addressing the question of the degree to which their results were ex-pected, and to what extent they can be accounted for by particular theories of speech percep-tion. You might report on that, as well, again using your own words. Part I of this handout issupposed to help you to understand the paper well enough that you can give a meaningful sum-mary.

I would think thisshould give youa page-and-a-half to two pages of essentially summarizing thearticle. This leaves you with a page to a page-and-a-half to express yourself on what you thoughtof the paper. Did it show what the authors think it showed? Was their general conception of the big picture sensible? Part II of the handoutparticularly, the questions I pose below, aresupposed to help you to develop a feeling about these issues. You, of course, are entitled to yourown assessment and should not be swayed by my opinions, but you should have thought about the issues I raise in these questions, and you should probably address at least a few of them in whatever you write.Some Questions:

1. We have spent some time talking about what perception might actually be, in some kindof technical (i.e., scienti cally useful) sense. On pg. 818 of the paper, the authors write thefollowing: In this experiement and the next, we informed subjects that cross-modal syl-lables were paired independently, and we requested that they therefore make their judg-ments of heard syllables on the basis of what they heard only; we did so in an e fort to re-strict cross-modal e fects to in uences on perception rather than on judgment. Clearly,the authors recognize a di ference between perception and the determination of whatone has just experienced (judgment), and are trying to make sure they tap into percep-tion only. Does telling the listeners to report only on what they heard do this, do youthink?

2. On the same page, a few lines later: Data from 10 additional subjects were eliminatedfrom most analyses because their identi cations of felt syllables did not signi cantly ex-ceed chance (60.6% correct; z= 1.64). This feels a little bit like the following: Im investi-gating the math skillsof this class, and so I givea little test, and 10of you do no better than

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chance on the test, so appear to be simply guessing. So I throw your scores out, and useeveryone elses scores. I would obviously not end up with a reasonable picture of the mathskills of our course (since I threw out all the lowest scoring people!). Is what Fowler andDekle are doing di ferent enough from this to give a reasonable picture of human speechperception using this technique?

3. In the sentence just before that one, they write one students data were eliminated fromthe analyses when she reported in debrie ng that she had not believed our (accurate)statement that felt and heard syllables had been paired independently. The authorsdont make clear whether they asked all the subjects whether they believed this or not(so perhaps all their subjects held this belief), but, leaving that to one side, if this subjectbelieved the non-auditory stimuli always matched the auditory ones (which she has tohave, in order to draw the conclusion that they had lied about mismatching them), thenis that irrelevant? Should her data be excluded?

4. Onthe samepage, fn. 1, theynote the problem that the orthographic imagewas present fora very long time, which allowed the subjects to not look at it early in the processing (butto wait), which could mean that the visual input was not even accessed until a perceptualdecision had already been made. They allegedly deal with this in Experiment 2are yousatis ed by what they did?

5. On pg. 823, fn. 4, we see the authors reaction to some concerns presumably raised by re- viewers of their paper. Note the following: to make the movements (particularly of /ba/)synchronous with the synthetic syllable...closing movements for the consonant had tobe initiated before the onset of the signal so that articulatory release, where the onset of acoustic energy begins for stop consonants, co-occurred with the stop burst and vowelonset. This is presumably also true in visual McGurk e fect experiments: as we noted inclass, the actual sound of a stop is silence, sound commences only upon the release of thestop. It follows from this that the haptic (or, in visual McGurk e fect experiments, the vi-sual input) indicating that a labial is involvedcomes beforetheauditory evidence for whatis being said: they are precisely not synchronous (in spite of the rather lengthy discussionof such things). Does this matter?

6. As for big picture issues, if we draw a distinction between something that we might callperceptionthe construction of an initial mental representation of sensory inputandsomething we might call judgment (the term used by the authors)the construction of sense forwhatone has just experienced created by integrating allof theevidence availableto one, including prior beliefs, possibly contradictory sensory data, expectations for thefuture, etc.then is there likely to be such a thing as cross-modal perception?

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