Crossmodal Speech Priming of Visual Objects: A New Approach for Urgent Information Transfer from Car to Driver

Contents being conveyed to the driver by in-car information and warning systems are becoming more and more diverse and complex. Hence, new solutions beyond sounds and graphical interfaces are apparently needed for rapid disambiguation of presentations. This paper provides a short overview about speech warnings for drivers and describes new insights about the topical issue of crossmodal speech priming in cognitive psychology. Furthermore, an outline of our previous research on this topic is given. Transfer of recent results to the applied field is promising, since keyword warnings could for example assist the driver with the timely detection of (possibly) critical visual objects in the environment without any visual distraction. Time-compressed speech keywords or even their simultaneous combination with diverse sound sources ("semanticons") appear to be promising approaches.