Dohen Marion, Loevenbruck Hélène
Speech and Cognition Department, GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France.
Lang Speech. 2009;52(Pt 2-3):177-206. doi: 10.1177/0023830909103166.
Prosodic contrastive focus is used to attract the listener's attention to a specific part of the utterance. Mostly conceived of as auditory/acoustic, it also has visible correlates which have been shown to be perceived. This study aimed at analyzing auditory-visual perception of prosodic focus by elaborating a paradigm enabling an auditory-visual advantage measurement (avoiding the ceiling effect) and by examining the interaction between audition and vision. A first experiment proved the efficiency of a whispered speech paradigm to measure an auditory-visual advantage for the perception of prosodic features. A second experiment used this paradigm to examine and characterize the auditory-visual perceptual processes. It combined performance assessment (focus detection score) to reaction time measurements and confirmed and extended the results from the first experiment. This study showed that adding vision to audition for perception of prosodic focus can not only improve focus detection but also reduce reaction times. A further analysis suggested that audition and vision are actually integrated for the perception of prosodic focus. Visual-only perception appeared to be facilitated for whispered speech suggesting an enhancement of visual cues in whispering. Moreover, the potential influence of the presence of facial markers on perception is discussed.
韵律对比焦点用于吸引听众对话语特定部分的注意。它大多被认为是听觉/声学方面的，但也有可见的相关特征，并且这些特征已被证明是可以被感知的。本研究旨在通过设计一种能够测量视听优势（避免天花板效应）的范式，并通过研究听觉与视觉之间的相互作用，来分析韵律焦点的视听感知。第一个实验证明了低声言语范式在测量韵律特征感知的视听优势方面的有效性。第二个实验使用该范式来检查和表征视听感知过程。它将性能评估（焦点检测分数）与反应时间测量相结合，证实并扩展了第一个实验的结果。这项研究表明，在韵律焦点感知中加入视觉不仅可以提高焦点检测能力，还可以缩短反应时间。进一步的分析表明，听觉和视觉实际上是为了韵律焦点的感知而整合的。对于低声言语，仅视觉感知似乎更容易，这表明在低语中视觉线索得到了增强。此外，还讨论了面部标记的存在对感知的潜在影响。
