Prosodic Structure in Audiovisual Spoken Word Recognition

Project summary

The research project extends current research by investigating for the first time the role of auditory and visual prosody in audiovisual spoken word recognition. Within this novel field of research, the focus of the current project will be on two key issues in how prosody might influence (audiovisual) word recognition, namely (a) how visual lexical stress information constrains lexical competition, and (b) how visual prosodic cues aid the segmentation of continuous speech. For each issue, it will be investigated in newly developed audiovisual versions of on-line word recognition tasks, such as fragment priming and word monitoring, whether visual prosodic cues influence these processes, what the specific nature of these visual cues is, and how exactly these cues influence word recognition. The current project will seek to deepen our understanding of phonological knowledge by specifying how quantitative models of spoken word recognition could use visual information for segmentation and/or in the retrieval of lexical stress. More generally, the goal of this project is to develop a theory of phonological competence, with regard to lexical knowledge, that takes visual as well as auditory, segmental and suprasegmental information into account.