Journal
LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES
Volume 28, Issue 8, Pages 1207-1223Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2012.701758
Keywords
Visual speech; Lexical access; Phonological priming; Lexical frequency
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
When the auditory information is deteriorated by noise in a conversation, watching the face of a speaker enhances speech intelligibility. Recent findings indicate that decoding the facial movements of a speaker accelerates word recognition. The objective of this study was to provide evidence that the mere presentation of the first two phonemesthat is, the articulatory gestures of the initial syllableis enough visual information to activate a lexical unit and initiate the lexical access process. We used a priming paradigm combined with a lexical decision task. The primes were syllables that either shared the initial syllable with an auditory target or not. In Experiment 1, the primes were displayed in audiovisual, auditory-only or visual-only conditions. There was a priming effect in all conditions. Experiment 2 investigated the locus (prelexical vs. lexical or postlexical) of the facilitation effect observed in the visual-only condition by manipulating the target's word frequency. The facilitation produced by the visual prime was significant for low-frequency words but not for high-frequency words, indicating that the locus of the effect is not prelexical. This suggests that visual speech mostly contributes to the word recognition process when lexical access is difficult.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available