Asymmetries in unimodal visual vowel perception: The roles of oral-facial kinematics, orientation, and configuration.

ABSTRACT: Masapollo, Polka, and Ménard (2017) recently reported a robust directional asymmetry in unimodal visual vowel perception: Adult perceivers discriminate a change from an English /u/ viseme to a French /u/ viseme significantly better than a change in the reverse direction. This asymmetry replicates a frequent pattern found in unimodal auditory vowel perception that points to a universal bias favoring more extreme vocalic articulations, which lead to acoustic signals with increased formant convergence. In the present article, the authors report 5 experiments designed to investigate whether this asymmetry in the visual realm reflects a speech-specific or general processing bias. They successfully replicated the directional effect using Masapollo et al.'s dynamically articulating faces but fail

SUBMITTER: Masapollo M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6037555 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature