Speech through ears and eyes: interfacing the senses with the supramodal brain

Virginie van Wassenhove

The comprehension of auditory-visual (AV) speech integration has greatly benefited from recent advances in neurosciences and multisensory research. AV speech integration raises numerous questions relevant to the computational rules needed for binding information (within and across sensory modalities), the representational format in which speech information is encoded in the brain (e.g., auditory vs. articulatory), or how AV speech ultimately interfaces with the linguistic system. The following non-exhaustive review provides a set of empirical findings and theoretical questions that have fed the original proposal for predictive coding in AV speech processing. More recently, predictive coding has pervaded many fields of inquiries and positively reinforced the need to refine the notion of internal models in the brain together with their implications for the interpretation of neural activity recorded with various neuroimaging techniques. However, it is argued here that the strength of predictive coding frameworks reside in the specificity of the generative internal models not in their generality; specifically, internal models come with a set of rules applied on particular representational formats themselves depending on the levels and the network structure at which predictive operations occur. As such, predictive coding in AV speech owes to specify the level(s) and the kinds of internal predictions that are necessary to account for the perceptual benefits or illusions observed in the field. Among those specifications, the actual content of a prediction comes first and foremost, followed by the representational granularity of that prediction in time. This review specifically presents a focused discussion on these issues.