Absence of audio-aerotactile integration in speech perception among congenitally blind adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multisensory integration plays a central role in shaping perceptual experience, but how such processes develop in the absence of vision remains unclear. Previous work has shown that sighted individuals integrate tactile air-puff cues with auditory speech signals, even in the absence of linguistic experience linking the two modalities. This study asked whether congenitally blind individuals form similar perceptual associations. Ten blind French-speaking adults completed a forced-choice identification task involving plosive consonants presented along a voice onset time continuum, with and without synchronized air puffs to the skin. Unlike sighted participants in earlier research, the blind group showed no evidence of audio-aerotactile integration. This absence of effect was not attributable to heightened auditory precision or insufficient statistical power. We interpret these findings within the framework of maximum likelihood estimation and discuss possible explanations: (1) that blind individuals flexibly down-weighted the tactile cue as uninformative in context or (2) that they never formed a strong association between the cues due to a lack of early visual experience. These results suggest that visual input may influence how cross-modal associations are formed or weighted in speech perception.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".