DEPENDING on whose it is, breath on your neck may or may not feel good. Either way, now it seems that it can help you understand what someone is saying. The discovery could lead to hearing aids that emit puffs of air.

    We know that what we see affects what we hear. For example, if we hear "ba" while watching a person saying "ga" we think we've heard "da". Bryan Gick and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, wondered whether tactile sensations affect hearing too.

    In speech, the "aspirated" syllables "pa" and "ta" are accompanied by a puff of exhaled air, whereas "ba" and "da" are not. Such puffs aren't always detected when someone is speaking, but Gick's team reasoned that the brain might learn to use puffs to modify its perception of certain sounds.

    They had 66 volunteers listen to a male voice saying all four syllables against background noise that made it hard to distinguish them. At the same time as some of the syllables, they delivered a puff of air to the hand or neck.

    Although many volunteers could not consciously feel the puffs, they were still more successful at correctly identifying "pa" and "ta" when these sounds were accompanied by air puffs. In contrast, air puffs made it less likely that they would correctly identify "ba" and "da" and more likely that they would mistake these for sounds for "pa" and "ta" （Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08572）.

    Gick says that we likely use puffs of air to make sense of speech. "It gets integrated into a single event in your mind," he says. He envisions hearing aids or headsets fitted with devices that emit puffs of air when they detect an aspirated sound. These might help pilots struggling to make out communications in a noisy plane, he says. But John Foxe at the City University of New York says it is not clear that puffs would work "in real-world conditions".

    不同的人呼在脖子上的氣的感覺是不同的。無論如何，如今看來它還能幫助你聽懂某人說的是什么。這項(xiàng)發(fā)現(xiàn)或許或許能創(chuàng)造出一種能釋放氣息的助聽器。

    視覺能影響聽覺，這大家都知道。例如，若我們聽到有人說"吧",但看見那人說的是"嘎",我們就會(huì)覺得我們聽到了"嗒".加拿大溫哥華大英哥倫比亞大學(xué)的布萊恩吉克以及同事便猜測(cè)，觸覺是否也會(huì)影響聽覺。

    講話時(shí)， "pa"和"ta"這兩個(gè)音節(jié)在發(fā)聲吐字時(shí)人在呼氣，而 "ba"和"da"時(shí)則沒有。有時(shí)人在講話時(shí)并不時(shí)常注意到這樣的喘氣，吉爾的研究組這樣解釋道：大腦可能發(fā)出命令讓人喘氣，從而調(diào)節(jié)某些聲音的認(rèn)知。

    他們安排66位志愿者辨認(rèn)一位男聲發(fā)出的四音節(jié)的單詞，不僅如此，他們加入背景音樂使其更有難度。同時(shí)，在到某些音節(jié)時(shí)，他們還加入一些喘息到受試者的手部或頸部。

    盡管其中許多志愿者都沒有有意識(shí)的感覺到這些喘息，他們?cè)诩尤脒@些喘息之后辨認(rèn)出"pa"和"ta" 的幾率更大。相對(duì)的，加入喘息之后，他們沒有很正確的辨認(rèn)出"ba"和"da",而錯(cuò)誤的認(rèn)為它們是"pa"和"ta".

    吉克說，我們時(shí)常憑喘息聲來聽清講話。"它會(huì)在你腦中融合成一體，"他說道，當(dāng)人們發(fā)現(xiàn)有發(fā)聲的音節(jié)時(shí)，他們會(huì)想像有助聽器或是腦中裝有可以喘息的器械。像這樣的，這會(huì)幫助飛行員勉強(qiáng)的在一架轟隆的飛機(jī)上進(jìn)行對(duì)話，他這樣闡述說。但是，紐約大學(xué)的約翰福克斯說道，這樣的喘息不一定能用在現(xiàn)實(shí)情況中。