Influence of visual speech information on the identification of foreign accented speech.
Rebecca Reed, Edward T. Auer · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
Seeing a native talker’s face improves speech intelligibility in noise for native perceivers. The intelligibility of foreign accented speech (English spoken by native talkers of Mandarin) is more susceptible to the effects of noise than the speech of native talkers. [Rogers et al., Lang Speech 47(2), 139–154 (2004)]. The current experiment investigated the influence of seeing the non-native talker’s face on the intelligibility of speech presented in noise. Ten talkers (nine non-native and one native) were recorded producing 155 sentences each. Talker-specific speech shaped noise was mixed with the audio of the sentences. Eighty-one native perceivers of English (nine per non-native talker) responded to 20 sentences spoken by the native talker and 28 by the non-native talker in each condition (audio-alone, visual-alone, audiovisual). Open set identification responses were scored as percent words correct for each condition and talker. Preliminary analyses demonstrate that although seeing the non-native talker increases intelligibility, the gain is significantly reduced compared to the native talker. Results will be discussed in terms of potential sources of the audiovisual gain. These sources are hypothesized to be differentially sensitive to the distortions arising in non-native speech. [Work supported in part by NIH/NIDCD DC04856 and the University of Kansas, UGRA.]