ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

2pSC4. The role of visual information in speaker normalization of fricatives.

Elizabeth A. Str

Dept. of Linguist., Ohio State Univ., 222 Oxley Hall, 1712 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH 43210-1298

This study examines the role of visual information in speaker normalization of fricatives by comparing listeners' responses to auditory stimuli only with responses to audiovisual (McGurk-type) stimuli to determine the effect that visual cues have in speaker normalization. Voices judged by listeners as auditorily ambiguous and unambiguous with respect to gender were used to construct four continua of tokens from /sad/ ``sod'' to /(sh)ad/ ``shod''; the continua were synchronized with videos of visually unambiguous male and female faces saying the same words. The audiovisual stimuli, as well as the auditory signals only, were then presented to listeners for identification as either ``sod'' or ``shod.'' Preliminary results suggest that visually disambiguating information affects the perception of auditorily ambiguous voices. This paper will present the results of additional tests on a larger pool of listeners. [Work supported by NIH.]