Visual Speech Mitigates the Influence of Speech Rate on Speech Perception
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Date
2020-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Sentence perception can be affected by manipulating speech rate. Dilley and Pitt (2010) found that small function words (e.g. “or”, “are”) could be made to disappear in a sentence by slowing down the rate of the surrounding context. When the target region containing the function word is shorter in comparison to the context rate, perceived target word boundaries disappear. Expanding on this finding, the current study tested if the addition of visual cues could reverse the effect and cause function word reports to increase despite the slowed context. With the inclusion of visual cues that clearly show the function word, the proportion of function word reports generally increased among slowed-context sentences compared to sentences without the visual articulation of a function word. Normal-rate sentences displayed consistently high function word reports regardless of whether the visual function word was present or absent. The results suggest that speech rate effects can be negated with the integration of conflicting visual speech cues. While rate cues aid in determining word onset and perception for casual speech, their effect can be overridden with additional visual input.
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Keywords
audiovisual cues, speech rate, audiovisual integration, speech segmentation, speech perception