ABSTRACT
The theme of this book involves the development of intersensory perception and how it occurs across different species. The present chapter is concerned with the understanding of spoken language, a skill so far unique to humans. Although spoken language is usually thought of as unimodal, there is now good evidence for its multimodal nature. Hence many speech scientists are turning from the study of auditory speech perception to spoken language understanding. Within the domain of spoken language, the scientist views understanding as being influenced by many sources of information. In addition to auditory information and situational context, two important sources in face-to-face communication are gestures and facial movements of the lips and tongue.
