Abstract
Seeing speaker's face is known as a crucial factor to enhance the intelligibility of speaker's voice. We hypothesized that the visual amplification of the speech perception could be realized by the motor prediction in the mirror neuron system for the speech production. Here we measured the human scalp EEG during a voice listening task to elucidate this hypothesis. The task consisted of a voice-lip asynchrony condition, and a mosaic image condition to allow us to elucidate the effect of mirror neuron system. The results showed that the intelligibility of voice perception was enhanced by seeing the speaker's face, accompanying the EEG mu rhythm suppression, which is an index of the activity in the mirror neuron system. This supports our hypothesis that the motor prediction by the mirror neuron system enhances the vocal communication.
