The effect of eye-gaze direction on speech intelligibility

In many daily situations we move our eyes to capture different visual information. Previous studies have shown interactions between the eye-gaze direction and auditory perception. The eye-gaze direction has been shown to modulate activity to acoustic stimuli in the auditory cortex of monkeys. In humans, decreased thresholds of binaural lateralization cues and improved accuracy of understanding series of digits in the presence of other speech has been shown. Here, we investigated the effect of the eye-gaze direction on speech perception of single-digit and 4-digit streams while directing the gaze at different directions containing either speech or non-speech stimuli. The speech interferers were also digits but a different gender than the target speech. The non-speech interferers consisted of speech-modulated speech shaped noise. The results showed improved speech intelligibility when the gaze direction and the auditory target direction were matching, in comparison to conditions where the gaze is pointed at a non-target direction. No differences were found comparing single-digit and 4-digit streams. Presenting speech or non-speech stimuli at the gaze direction did not affect the speech intelligibility results. These findings further clarify the influence of the gaze direction on speech perception. [The copyright for the referenced work is owned by Acoustical Society of America. Copies of full-text articles should only be made or obtained from the publisher or authorized sources.]