Segmenting Speech by Mouth: The Role of Oral Prosodic Cues for Visual Speech Segmentation

Adults are able to use visual prosodic cues in the speaker's face to segment speech. Furthermore, eye-tracking data suggest that learners will shift their gaze to the mouth during visual speech segmentation. Although these findings suggest that the mouth may be viewed more than the eyes or nose during visual speech segmentation, no study has examined the direct functional importance of individual features; thus, it is unclear which visual prosodic cues are important for word segmentation. In this study, we examined the impact of first removing (Experiment 1) and then isolating (Experiment 2) individual facial features on visual speech segmentation. Segmentation performance was above chance in all conditions except for when the visual display was restricted to the eye region (eyes only condition in Experiment 2). This suggests that participants were able to segment speech when they could visually access the mouth but not when the mouth was completely removed from the visual display, providing evidence that visual prosodic cues conveyed by the mouth are sufficient and likely necessary for visual speech segmentation.