A critical evaluation of visually moderated phonetic context effects

On the causes of compensation for coarticulation: Evidence for phonological mediation

“…An audiovisual design has already been applied to study compensation for coarticulation in liquid-stop (Fowler, Brown, & Mann, 2000;Holt, Stephens, & Lotto, 2005) and the fricative-stop (Vroomen, 1992;Vroomen & de Gelder, 2001) cases. These experiments showed that perceivers can use visual cues to compensate for coarticulation in these sequences .…”

Putting phonetic context effects into context: A commentary on Fowler (2006)

“…Using new stimulus materials, Holt, Stephens, and Lotto (2005) recently attempted replication of Fowler et al (2000) but failed to find any shift in target identification related to participants' identification of the context (see also Vroomen & de Gelder, 2001). A major difference in the stimuli used in these two studies was that Fowler et al (2000) included video during the target syllable, whereas Holt et al (2005) displayed video only during the context. When the Fowler et al (2000) stimuli were edited to include video only during the context, they produced no effect.…”

“…The problem with this account is that it does not explain why there was no effect of context when the context was actually present. That is, in the original replication attempted by Holt et al (2005), context was physically present, but there was no video during the target and no context effect; the listeners did not parse the effects of context. On the other hand, Fowler (2006) argues that when there was no context, the listeners parsed the context from the subtle video clues present during the target.…”

“…However, when only the target audio and video of the Fowler et al (2000) stimuli were presented (i.e., when there was no context), a shift in responses equivalent to the original Fowler et al (2000) context effect was observed. Holt et al (2005) concluded that there were subtle differences in the video presented simultaneously with the target that had nothing to do with disambiguating the context and that these differences influenced the listeners' speech identification. That is, the original results were not a context effect.…”

Phonetic Recalibration in Audiovisual Speech

“…was perceived as /sh/ and again, selective adaptation was observed (Samuel, 2001 Roberts & Summerfield, 1981). Thirdly, compensation for coarticulation (Repp & Mann, 1981) can be obtained through lexical speech context, as a lexically disambiguated /s/-/∫/ sound produces context effects on identifying members of a /t/-/k/ continuum (Elman & McClelland, 1988), but cannot be obtained by lipread context (Holt, Stephens, & Lotto, 2005;). As noted earlier, there are also differences in lipread and lexical recalibration; lexically induced recalibration is reported to be long lasting (Eisner & McQueen, 2006;Kraljic & Samuel, 2005) whereas lipread induced recalibration is short lived (e.g., van…”