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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Hearing wed and seeing red: The visual prominence of the lips in Anglo‑English /r/

Résumé

The change towards exclusively labial articulations of /r/ is well underway in England with instances of labiodental /r/ reported all over the country (e.g., Foulkes & Docherty, 2000; Marsden, 2006; Trudgill, 1974; Williams & Kerswill, 1999). Some have suggested that non-lingual variants of /r/ are gaining ground by speakers dropping the lingual articulation of the post-alveolar approximant [ɹ], leaving the labial one to form the primary constriction (Docherty & Foulkes, 2001; Foulkes & Docherty, 2000; Jones, 1972). The lip posture for [ɹ] in Anglo-English differs from the lip rounding observed for [w] and is described as labiodental-like (King & Ferragne, 2020). Labiodentalisation may be due to the visual prominence of the lips for [ɹ] (Docherty & Foulkes, 2001), which is confirmed in the present study with an audio-visual perception experiment. The results have implications not only for our understanding of the labial articulation of English /r/, but also for the role of visual speech cues in sound change. 40 native Anglo-English speakers were presented with monosyllabic words beginning with [ɹ], [w] and [l] produced by a native speaker, and were asked to identify the word they perceived from two word options. Stimuli were presented in noise in four presentation modalities: auditory-only (AO); visual-only (VO); congruous audio-visual (AVc); and incongruous (AVi) in which auditory-/w/ was paired with visual-/r/, and vice versa. The results indicate that the addition of noise did not completely mask acoustic cues because sensitivity measures showed that perceptual performance in AO was not at all random. Interestingly, the acoustic cues for the /r/-/w/ contrast seem ambiguous because when presented with AO /w/ stimuli, subjects actually reported perceiving /r/ more than /w/. Contrary to auditory cues, visual cues of the speaker’s lips appear to be highly informative as the participants were able to distinguish between /r/ and /w/ in VO with near-perfect accuracy. No significant difference was observed for the /r/-/w/ contrast between VO and AVc, contrary to the contrasts with /l/ for which perceptual sensitivity was greatest in AVc. The inclusion of contrasts with /l/ allowed for the confirmation that the lip postures for /r/ and /w/ are visibly different from that of a non-labial segment. Put together, the results indicate that Anglo-English subjects are capable of distinguishing between the labial articulations of /r/ and /w/ and that the visual cues of the lips may actually be more perceptually salient than the acoustic ones. Results from AVi provide further evidence of the heavy visual prominence of the lips for /r/. A strong influence of visual input was observed in the context of auditory-/w/ paired with visual-/r/ with over 83% visual /r/ responses. The rate of visual responses was significantly smaller for mismatched auditory-/r/ and visual-/w/, indicating that the labial posture for /w/ is more ambiguous than that of /r/, which will be discussed. In sum, the results from this study allow us to predict the continued labiodentalisation of Anglo-English /r/ given the relative perceptual certainty of the visual cue of the lips for [ɹ] contrary to its acoustics.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04139008 , version 1 (23-06-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04139008 , version 1

Citer

Hannah King. Hearing wed and seeing red: The visual prominence of the lips in Anglo‑English /r/. 'R-atics 7, Nov 2021, Lausanne (Suisse), Switzerland. ⟨hal-04139008⟩
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