Audiovisual perception of interrupted speech by nonnative listeners

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine the influence of visual cues in audiovisual perception of interrupted speech by nonnative English listeners and to identify the role of working memory, long-term memory retrieval, and vocabulary knowledge in audiovisual perception by nonnative listeners. The participants included 31 Mandarin-speaking English learners between 19 and 41 years of age. The perceptual stimuli were noise-filled periodically interrupted AzBio and QuickSIN sentences with or without visual cues that showed a male speaker uttering the sentences. In addition to sentence recognition, the listeners completed a semantic fluency task, verbal (operation span) and visuospatial (symmetry span) working memory tasks, and two vocabulary knowledge tests (Vocabulary Level Test and Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English). The results revealed significantly better speech recognition in the audio-visual condition than the audio-only condition, but the magnitude of visual benefit was substantially attenuated for sentences that had limited semantic context. The listeners’ vocabulary size in English played a key role in the restoration of missing speech information and audiovisual integration in the perception of interrupted speech. Meanwhile, the listeners’ verbal working memory capacity played an important role in audiovisual integration especially for the difficult stimuli with limited semantic context.