Audiovisual perception of gemination and pharyngealization in Arabic

Abstract

This paper addresses a gap in the literature on audiovisual speech perception. Existing literature has largely examined the degree to which the audiovisual perception of primary place of articulation is influenced by visual information. Visual influences on the audiovisual categorization of a consonant as long (geminate) or short (singleton) have not, however, previously been examined. Furthermore, no experiment, to the authors’ knowledge, has examined audiovisual perception of the presence or absence of the secondary articulation of pharyngealization. The experiments reported in this article fill this gap by demonstrating that the audiovisual perception, by Arabic speakers, of both singleton versus geminate and pharyngealized versus non-pharyngealized is susceptible to visual influence. These experiments also serve to address the general lack of research on audiovisual speech processing in Arabic. Finally, these experiments provide a methodological advance in dealing with temporal asynchrony when investigating audiovisual speech perception.