This paper investigates the influence of visual cues in the perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English. Audio-visual perception of Anglo-English /r/ warrants attention because productions are increasingly non-lingual, labiodental (e.g., [ʋ]), possibly involving visual prominence of the lips for the post-alveolar approximant [ɹ]. Forty native speakers identified [ɹ] and [w] stimuli in four presentation modalities: auditory-only, visual-only, congruous audio-visual, and incongruous audio-visual. Auditory stimuli were presented in noise. The results indicate that native Anglo-English speakers can identify [ɹ] and [w] from visual information alone with almost perfect accuracy. Furthermore, visual cues dominate the perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast when auditory and visual cues are mismatched. However, auditory perception is ambiguous because participants tend to perceive both [ɹ] and [w] as /r/. Auditory ambiguity is related to Anglo-English listeners' exposure to acoustic variation for /r/, especially to [ʋ], which is often confused with [w]. It is suggested that a specific labial configuration for Anglo-English /r/ encodes the contrast with /w/ visually, compensating for the ambiguous auditory contrast. An audio-visual enhancement hypothesis is proposed, and the findings are discussed with regard to sound change.
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July 2022
July 13 2022
Difficult to hear but easy to see: Audio-visual perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English
Hannah King
;
Hannah King
a)
Université Paris Cité, UFR Linguistique, CLILLAC-ARP
, F-75013 Paris, France
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Ioana Chitoran
Ioana Chitoran
Université Paris Cité, UFR Linguistique, CLILLAC-ARP
, F-75013 Paris, France
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a)
Also at: UFR Études Anglophones. Electronic mail: [email protected]
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152, 368–379 (2022)
Article history
Received:
July 22 2021
Accepted:
June 23 2022
Citation
Hannah King, Ioana Chitoran; Difficult to hear but easy to see: Audio-visual perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 July 2022; 152 (1): 368–379. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0012660
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