Showing papers by "Andrew N. Meltzoff published in 1991"

Integrating speech information across talkers, gender, and sensory modality: female faces and male voices in the McGurk effect.

Abstract: Studies of the McGurk effect have shown that when discrepant phonetic information is delivered to the auditory and visual modalities, the information is combined into a new percept not originally presented to either modality. In typical experiments, the auditory and visual speech signals are generated by the same talker. The present experiment examined whether a discrepancy in the gender of the talker between the auditory and visual signals would influence the magnitude of the McGurk effect. A male talker’s voice was dubbed onto a videotape containing a female talker’s face, and vice versa. The gender-incongruent videotapes were compared with gender-congruent videotapes, in which a male talker’s voice was dubbed onto a male face and a female talker’s voice was dubbed onto a female face. Even though there was a clear incompatibility in talker characteristics between the auditory and visual signals on the incongruent videotapes, the resulting magnitude of the McGurk effectwas not significantly different for the incongruent as opposed to the congruent videotapes. The results indicate that the mechanism for integrating speech information from the auditory and the visual modalities is not disrupted by a gender incompatibility even when it is perceptually apparent. The findings are compatible with the theoretical notion that information about voice characteristics of the talker is extracted and used to normalize the speech signal at an early stage of phonetic processing, prior to the integration of the auditory and the visual information.

Cross-modal speech perception in adults and infants using nonspeech auditory stimuli.

Abstract: Adults and infants were tested for the capacity to detect correspondences between nonspeech sounds and real vowels. The /i/ and /a/ vowels were presented in 3 different ways: auditory speech, silent visual faces articulating the vowels, or mentally imagined vowels. The nonspeech sounds were either pure tones or 3-tone complexes that isolated a single feature of the vowel without allowing the vowel to be identified. Adults perceived an orderly relation between the nonspeech sounds and vowels. They matched high-pitched nonspeech sounds to /i/ vowels and low-pitched nonspeech sounds to /a/ vowels. In contrast, infants could not match nonspeech sounds to the visually presented vowels. Infants' detection of correspondence between auditory and visual speech appears to require the whole speech signal; with development, an isolated feature of the vowel is sufficient for detection of the cross-modal correspondence. There is a long tradition in speech research of comparing the perception of speech and nonspeech events. A classic case was the attempt to determine whether nonspeech auditory signals were subject to the phenomenon of "categorical perception" (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Ken