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Hearing foreign voices: does knowing what is said affect visual-masked-speech detection?
1Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia. jeesun@unimelb.edu.au
Perception
|March 5, 2003
Summary
Seeing a speaker's face improves speech understanding, especially when their lip movements match the sound. Language knowledge also plays a role, sometimes causing confusion when lip movements don't align well with speech sounds.
Area of Science:
- Auditory Perception
- Audiovisual Integration
- Speech Processing
Background:
- Audio-visual (AV) integration enhances speech perception.
- The mechanisms behind AV speech perception, including sensory and cognitive factors, are not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of visual speech cues in masked-speech detection.
- To differentiate between sensory amplification and higher-level cognitive contributions to the AV advantage.
Main Methods:
- Participants detected speech under auditory masking conditions.
- The correlation between acoustic speech envelopes and visual articulator movements was manipulated.
- Participants' knowledge of the speaker's language was varied.
Main Results:
- An AV advantage was observed for sentences with high acoustic-articulator correlation, irrespective of language knowledge.
- For low correlation sentences, language knowledge significantly impacted performance.
- Lack of language knowledge led to an AV inhibitory effect in low-correlation conditions.
Conclusions:
- Both sensory enhancement and cognitive factors contribute to AV speech detection.
- Visual speech information is integrated differently based on acoustic-visual congruence and language familiarity.