Visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition

Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). Visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition. In J. Vroomen, M. Swerts, & E. Krahmer (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing 2007 (pp. 162-166). Tilburg: University of Tilburg.
Listeners use suprasegmental auditory lexical stress information to resolve the competition words engage in during spoken-word recognition. The present study investigated whether (a) visual speech provides lexical stress information, and, more importantly, (b) whether this visual lexical stress information is used to resolve lexical competition. Dutch word pairs that differ in the lexical stress realization of their first two syllables, but not segmentally (e.g., 'OCtopus' and 'okTOber'; capitals marking primary stress) served as auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual speech primes. These primes either matched (e.g., 'OCto-'), mismatched (e.g., 'okTO-'), or were unrelated to (e.g., 'maCHI-') a subsequent printed target (octopus), which participants had to make a lexical decision to. To the degree that visual speech contains lexical stress information, lexical decisions to printed targets should be modulated through the addition of visual speech. Results show, however, no evidence for a role of visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
Publication date
2007

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