Effect of speaker’s age on perceivers’ ability to predict rounding from AV speech

Abstract

We have developed a noninvasive method that synthesizes the complex activity of speaking into a single measure to investigate the scope of anticipatory behavior as this relates to units of execution (Redford, Bogdanov, Vatikiotis-Bateson, 2016). The method leverages work in audio-visual speech perception to identify degree of anticipatory coarticulation at specific temporal locations, manipulated using a gating paradigm. The aim here was to test whether the method was robust to group differences in speakers’ age. Twenty-four college-aged adults judged the presence or absence of rounding in minimal pair sentences produced by 3 adults and 3 five-year-old children based on their AV-recorded speech, gated at different distances from the target rounded/unrounded vowel. Perceivers’ ability to correctly detect an upcoming rounded vowel varied as a function of the prevocalic consonant’s coarticulatory resistance and as a function of distance from target. There was no main effect of age group on perceivers’ accura...