15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Audiovisual Integration of Point Light Displays of Speech by Deaf Adults Following Cochlear Implantation

Tonya R. Bergeson (1), David B. Pisoni (1), Lorin Lachs (2), Lindsey Reese (1)

(1) Indiana University, USA
(2) California State University at Fresno, USA

Normal-hearing (NH) adults display audiovisual enhancement when degraded auditory input (e.g., words, sentences) is paired with point-light displays of speech, which isolate the kinematic properties of a speaker's face. Do deaf adults who use cochlear implants (CIs) benefit in the same way? In the present study, we investigated audiovisual (AV) word recognition using point-light displays (PLDs) of speech in a small group of postlingually deaf adults with CIs and a group of NH adults. Participants were asked to repeat aloud what they thought the talker said under three conditions: Auditory-alone, Visual-alone, and Audiovisual. Both groups displayed evidence of AV enhancement with PLDs. These results suggest that NH and CI adults were sensitive to the kinematic properties in speech represented in the PLDs, and they were able to use kinematics to improve their word recognition performance even with highly degraded visual displays of speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bergeson, Tonya R. / Pisoni, David B. / Lachs, Lorin / Reese, Lindsey (2003): "Audiovisual integration of point light displays of speech by deaf adults following cochlear implantation", In ICPhS-15, 1469-1472.