Aero-tactile integration in Mandarin

Abstract

Previous research has shown that audio-aligned air puffs applied to the skin can enhance the perception of speech audio [12]. In this study, we applied dynamically varying air flow during two-way forced-choice identification of Mandarin words, comparing them to results of a study on English which showed perceptual enhancement for both stops and fricatives [6]. Two differences emerged: Psychometric testing identified the 80% accuracy signal-to-noise ratio for Mandarin words to be at - 1.1 dB SNR, compared to -9.0 for English nonsense syllables. In addition, in Mandarin, aero-tactile stimuli only enhanced classification of voiceless stops, whereas it enhanced classification of voiceless stops and fricatives in English. These differences may partially result from the interaction of high conditional acoustic entropy in Mandarin compared to English [24] and air flow – that is, the Mandarin syllables had to be played with more preserved acoustic information, weakening the potential effect of air flow.