if a person's voice says 'pa,' but the person's lips mouth the word 'ka'' One would think you might hear 'pa' because that is what was said. But in fact, with the conflicting verbal and visual signals, the brain is far more likely to hear 'ta,' an entirely new sound
I think that this is related to the ventriloquist's trick for dealing with labial sounds.
The best example of perception versus reality we worked with was to discover that consonents following vowels were actually largely determined in terms of perception by the vowel itself: we could remove the acoustic signatures of the consonant and people could still tell from the vowel what the removed consonant was.
The importance of this, of course, is that we have to recognise that our relationship with 'reality' is far more convoluted than naive positivism (the kind that Richard Dawkins seems to fall back into regularly) would have us believe.
Although we experience speech as a series of words like print on a page, the speech signal is not as clear as print, and must be interpreted rather than simply recognized
Indeed, many of us have had the experience of hearing someone say something, asking them to repeat it because we couldn't make it out, and before they can repeat it, it all clicks into place in our mind as our brain processes the sound further and comes up with an interpretation: all of a suddent we seem to have heard it perfectly: the linear illusion is restored.
scientists now know the Broca's region is plays a major role in this process.
New Brain Mechanism Identified For Interpreting Speech:
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