Who says looks don’t matter?

It looks like what you see changes what you hear. Researchers from Haskins Laboratories and MIT have found that different facial expressions alter the sounds we hear.

This shows that the somatosensory system — the mix of senses and brain filtering that determines how you perceive your body — is involved when you process speech.

This doesn’t have a whole lot to do with speech commands except to show that it’s easy to underestimate the complexity, and subtlety, of our perception of spoken language.

Resources:

Somatosensory function in speech perception
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0810063106