Combining partial information from speech and text.

Abstract

The current study investigated how partial speech and text information, distributed at various interruption rates, is combined to support sentence recognition in quiet. Speech and text stimuli were interrupted by silence and presented unimodally or combined in multimodal conditions. Across all conditions, performance was best at the highest interruption rates. Listeners were able to gain benefit from most multimodal presentations, even when the rate of interruption was mismatched between modalities. Supplementing partial speech with incomplete visual cues can improve sentence intelligibility and compensate for degraded speech in adverse listening conditions. However, individual variability in benefit depends on unimodal performance.