The June 2009 edition of Scientific American reported on research about how pulling your mouth around affects which words you hear. The McGurk effect is about visual cues affect how people hear speech. This research shows how touch (and perhaps mouth position) can influence speech perception. David Ostry of McGill University has been "studying the relationship between speech and the somatosensory system, the network of receptors in skin and muscle that report information on tactile stimuli to the brain." In the study the mouths of volunteers were stretched up, down, and back while the listened to a continous stream of words such as head, had, and ambigous sounds in between. When streched upward they were more likely to hear "head" even though the word was more like "had", and when stretched downward they were more likely to hear "had" even if the word was more like head. It is no accident that the lips must move up or down to form head or had. The lips make these corresponding movements when pronouncing those words.
This study appears to back up an hypothosis from the 1960s called the "motor theory of speech perception", which claims that "neural machinery associated with speech production is also involved with speech perception."
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