The role of visual information in the processing of place and manner features in speech perception

Abstract

Visual information provided by a talker's mouth movements can influence the perception of certain speech features. Thus, the "McGurk effect" shows that when the syllable (bi) is presented audibly, in synchrony with the syllable (gi), as it is presented visually, a person perceives the talker as saying (di). Moreover, studies have shown that interactions occur between place and voicing features in phonetic perception, when information is presented audibly. In our first experiment, we asked whether feature interactions occur when place information is specificed by a combination of auditory and visual information. Members of an auditory continuum ranging from (ibi) to (ipi) were paired with a video display of a talker saying (igi). The auditory tokens were heard as ranging from (ibi) to (ipi), but the auditory-visual tokens were perceived as ranging from (idi) to (iti). The results demonstrated that the voicing boundary for the auditory-visual tokens was located at a significantly longer VOT value than the voicing boundary for the auditory continuum presented without the visual information. These results demonstrate that place-voice interactions are not limited to situations in which place information is specified audibly.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)