Visual Influences on Alignment to Voice Onset Time

Purpose: Speech shadowing experiments were conducted to test whether alignment (inadvertent imitation) to voice onset time (VOT) can be influenced by visual speech information. Method: Experiment 1 examined whether alignment would occur to auditory /pa/ syllables manipulated to have 3 different VOTs. Nineteen female participants were asked to listen to 180 syllables over headphones and to say each syllable out loud quickly and clearly. In Experiment 2, visual speech tokens composed of a face articulating /pa/ syllables at 2 different rates were dubbed onto the audio /pa/ syllables of Experiment 1. Sixteen new female participants were asked to listen to and watch (over a video monitor) 180 syllables and to say each syllable out loud quickly and clearly. Results: Results of Experiment 1 showed that the 3 VOTs of the audio /pa/ stimuli influenced the VOTs of the participants' produced syllables. Results of Experiment 2 revealed that both the visible syllable rate and audio VOT of the audiovisual /pa/ stimuli influenced the VOTs of the participants' produced syllables. Conclusion: These results show that, like auditory speech, visual speech information can induce speech alignment to a phonetically relevant property of an utterance.