Difficult to hear but easy to see: Audio-visual perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Année : 2022

Difficult to hear but easy to see: Audio-visual perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English

Résumé

This paper investigates the influence of visual cues in the perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English. Audio-visual perception of Anglo-English /r/ warrants attention because productions are increasingly non-lingual, labiodental (e.g., [ʋ]), possibly involving visual prominence of the lips for the post-alveolar approximant [ɹ]. Forty native speakers identified [ɹ] and [w] stimuli in four presentation modalities: auditory-only, visual-only, congruous audio-visual, and incongruous audio-visual. Auditory stimuli were presented in noise. The results indicate that native Anglo-English speakers can identify [ɹ] and [w] from visual information alone with almost perfect accuracy. Furthermore, visual cues dominate the perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast when auditory and visual cues are mismatched. However, auditory perception is ambiguous because participants tend to perceive both [ɹ] and [w] as /r/. Auditory ambiguity is related to Anglo-English listeners' exposure to acoustic variation for /r/, especially to [ʋ], which is often confused with [w]. It is suggested that a specific labial configuration for Anglo-English /r/ encodes the contrast with /w/ visually, compensating for the ambiguous auditory contrast. An audio-visual enhancement hypothesis is proposed, and the findings are discussed with regard to sound change.

Domaines

Linguistique

Dates et versions

hal-03741991 , version 1 (02-08-2022)

Identifiants

Citer

Hannah King, Ioana Chitoran. Difficult to hear but easy to see: Audio-visual perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2022, 152 (1), pp.368-379. ⟨10.1121/10.0012660⟩. ⟨hal-03741991⟩
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