Chen Yuchun, Hazan Valerie
Department of Human Communication Science, UCL, Gower Street, London, United Kingdom.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 Aug;126(2):858-65. doi: 10.1121/1.3158823.
The study investigated language and developmental factors in the use of visual information in audiovisual speech perception in speakers from different language backgrounds. Mandarin-Chinese and English adults and 8- to 9-year-old children were presented with /ba/, /da/, and /ga/ tokens spoken by two English and two Mandarin-Chinese speakers. A syllable identification task was presented in auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual (congruent and incongruent) conditions in clear and in noise. The results showed an increase in the use of visual information in adults relative to children in both the Chinese and English groups. In addition, a positive correlation between the total visual effect and speechreading performance was found, suggesting that the smaller visual influence in the bimodal condition for children might be accounted by their less sophisticated speechreading ability. In regard to the language factor, it was found that Chinese perceivers use visual information in their audiovisual speech processing to the same extent as English perceivers. Finally, there was evidence for a "non-native speaker effect" (i.e., stronger visual effect for non-native speech stimuli), but only for the English participants. Results from the current study suggest that the visual appearance of individual speakers and the acoustic-phonetic properties of specific languages should be considered in future cross-language studies.
该研究调查了来自不同语言背景的说话者在视听言语感知中使用视觉信息时的语言和发展因素。向说普通话的中国成年人、说英语的成年人以及8至9岁的儿童呈现了由两名说英语者和两名说普通话者说出的/ba/、/da/和/ga/音素。在清晰和有噪声的条件下，分别在仅听觉、仅视觉以及视听（一致和不一致）条件下进行音节识别任务。结果表明，在中文和英文组中，相对于儿童，成年人对视觉信息的使用有所增加。此外，还发现总视觉效应与唇读表现之间存在正相关，这表明儿童在双峰条件下较小的视觉影响可能是由于他们不太成熟的唇读能力。关于语言因素，发现中文感知者在其视听言语处理中使用视觉信息的程度与英文感知者相同。最后，有证据表明存在“非母语者效应”（即对非母语语音刺激有更强的视觉效应），但仅在英文参与者中存在。当前研究的结果表明，在未来的跨语言研究中应考虑个体说话者的视觉外观和特定语言的声学语音特性。
