Study Finds that Skin Helps Hearing of Speech

A new study carried out in Canada indicates that we hear speech also through our skin. The study says that our skin assists with hearing speech, and detects puffs of air produced by the speaker with certain sounds made. This is the first study of its kind to exhibit that our ears do not do all the work in hearing what another person says.

The study was carried out by Professor Bryan Gick from the Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada and PhD student Donald Derrick and was published in the November issue of Nature.

During the study, Gick and Derrick found that by directing puffs of air at skin, the hearer’s discernment of spoken syllables could be biased.
Gick, also a member of Haskins Laboratories, an affiliate of Yale University in the US, said the findings reveal: “We are much better at using tactile information than was previously thought. We are already aware of using our eyes to help us interpret speech, such as when we lip-read or observe facial features and gestures. Our study shows we can do the same with our skin, ‘hearing’ a puff of air, regardless of whether it got to our brains through our ears or our skin.”

English is one of the few languages that rely on some syllables being aspirated. This means that the speaker uses varied bursts of breath to certain sounds. The sounds ‘pa’ and ‘ta’ are possible only due to these puffs of air, whereas for sounds like ‘ba’ and ‘da’ aspiration is not used.