Articulatory peripherality modulates relative attention to the mouth during visual vowel discrimination

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2017-05, Vol.141 (5), p.4037-4037
• Main Authors: Masapollo, Matthew, Franklin, Lauren, Morgan, James, Polka, Linda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4989317

Masapollo, Polka, and Ménard (2016) have recently reported that adults from different language backgrounds show robust directional asymmetries in unimodal visual-only vowel discrimination: a change in mouth-shape from one associated with a relatively less peripheral vowel to one associated with a relatively more peripheral vowel (in F1-F2 articulatory/acoustic vowel space) results in significantly better performance than a change in the reverse direction. In the present study, we used eye-tracking methodology to examine the gaze behavior of English-speaking subjects while they performed Masapollo et al.'s visual vowel discrimination task. We successfully replicated this directional effect using Masapollo et al.'s visual stimulus materials, and found that subjects deployed selective attention to the oral region compared to the ocular region of the model speaker's face. In addition, gaze fixations to the mouth were found to increase while subjects viewed the more peripheral vocalic articulations compared to the less peripheral articulations, perhaps due to their larger, more extreme oral-facial kinematic patterns. This bias in subjects’ pattern of gaze behavior may contribute to asymmetries in visual vowel perception.