Lip-reading improves intelligibility in noisy acoustical environments. We hypothesized that watching mouth movements benefits speech comprehension in a 'cocktail party' by strengthening the encoding of the neural representations of the visually paired speech stream. In an audiovisual (AV) task, EEG was recorded as participants watched and listened to videos of a speaker uttering a sentence while also hearing a concurrent sentence by a speaker of the opposite gender. A key manipulation was that each audio sentence had a 200-ms segment replaced by white noise. To assess comprehension, subjects were tasked with transcribing the AV-attended sentence on randomly selected trials. In the auditory-only trials, subjects listened to the same sentences and completed the same task while watching a static picture of a speaker of either gender. Subjects directed their listening to the voice of the gender of the speaker in the video. We found that the N1 auditory-evoked potential (AEP) time-locked to white noise onsets was significantly more inhibited for the AV-attended sentences than for those of the auditorily-attended (A-attended) and AV-unattended sentences. N1 inhibition to noise onsets has been shown to index restoration of phonemic representations of degraded speech. These results underscore that attention and congruency in the AV setting help streamline the complex auditory scene, partly by reinforcing the neural representations of the visually attended stream, heightening the perception of continuity and comprehension.

中文翻译：

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“鸡尾酒会”中相关语音的视觉增强。

唇读可以改善嘈杂的声学环境中的清晰度。我们假设通过增强视觉配对语音流的神经表示的编码，观看嘴巴运动有益于“鸡尾酒会”中的语音理解。在视听（AV）任务中，EEG被记录为参与者观看和收听说话者说出句子的视频，同时还听取了异性说话者的并发句子。关键的操作是，每个音频句子都有一个200毫秒的段，由白噪声代替。为了评估理解力，受试者被要求在随机选择的试验中抄写AV句子。在仅听觉的试验中，受试者一边听相同的句子并完成相同的任务，一边观看两种性别说话者的静态图片。主题让他们聆听视频中说话者性别的声音。我们发现时间锁定到白噪声发作的N1听觉诱发电位（AEP）明显比AV照管的句子比听觉（A照管）和AV无人看的句子更受抑制。N1对噪声发作的抑制作用已显示出索引了退化语音的音素表示的恢复。这些结果强调，视听环境中的注意力和一致性有助于简化复杂的听觉场景，部分是通过增强视觉参与流的神经表示，增强连续性和理解力来实现的。我们发现时间锁定到白噪声发作的N1听觉诱发电位（AEP）明显比AV照管的句子比听觉（A照管）和AV无人看的句子更受抑制。N1对噪声发作的抑制作用已显示出索引了退化语音的音素表示的恢复。这些结果强调，在视听环境中的注意力和一致性有助于简化复杂的听觉场景，部分是通过增强视觉参与流的神经表示，增强连续性和理解力来实现的。我们发现时间锁定到白噪声发作的N1听觉诱发电位（AEP）明显比AV照管的句子比听觉（A照管）和AV无人看的句子更受抑制。N1对噪声发作的抑制作用已显示出索引了退化语音的音素表示的恢复。这些结果强调，在视听环境中的注意力和一致性有助于简化复杂的听觉场景，部分是通过增强视觉参与流的神经表示，增强连续性和理解力来实现的。N1对噪声发作的抑制作用已显示出索引了退化语音的音素表示的恢复。这些结果强调，在视听环境中的注意力和一致性有助于简化复杂的听觉场景，部分是通过增强视觉参与流的神经表示，增强连续性和理解力来实现的。N1对噪声发作的抑制作用已显示出索引了退化语音的音素表示的恢复。这些结果强调，在视听环境中的注意力和一致性有助于简化复杂的听觉场景，部分是通过增强视觉参与流的神经表示，增强连续性和理解力来实现的。