Sentence context induces lexical bias in audiovisual speech perception
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: The present study investigated whether semantic context enhances accuracy of word perception or merely induces a bias to perceive any speech input as a contextually appropriate word. Audiovisual speech tokens that were typically perceived as coherent words were compared with dubbed comparison stimuli that were not perceived as coherent words, either because they did not allow for the fusion of the auditory and visual speech inputs (Experiment 1), or because successful fusion resulted in a lexically inappropriate phoneme (Experiment 2). These dubbed speech tokens were presented as endings of semantically congruent versus incongruent sentences as subjects were asked to rate their lexical status (i.e., the word-likeness of the tokens). Results showed that subjects rendered enhanced lexicality ratings in semantically congruent conditions relative to incongruent conditions, whether or not the evaluated token was perceived as a word, and whether or not it allowed for audiovisual fusion. This reflects an effect of sentence context on lexical bias, not sensitivity (i.e., accuracy). Results speak against a clear distinction between lexical and semantic levels of analysis and are therefore inconsistent with models locating word recognition prior to semantic activation.
Author: Sabine Windmann
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2183111574