Abstract
As part of work to develop vibrotactile devices to convey voice fundamental frequency to hearing-impaired lipreaders, an experiment was conducted to investigate the visibility of contrastive stress and question-versus-statement intonation contours. Four sentences (“We will weigh you,” “We owe you a yoyo,” “Chuck caught two cats,” and “Pat cooked Pete's breakfast”) with contrastive stress on one of the first three words and spoken as either statements or questions by a male and a female were presented from videodisk. Sentences were chosen to minimize indexical or affective information that might be used to judge stress or intonation. Subjects were tested in a six alternative forced-choice procedure with response alternatives labeled “question” or “statement” and stress position “1,” “2,” or “3.” Results suggest that contrastive stress and intonation can be judged visually at levels significantly above chance. Judgments of stress were significantly more accurate than judgments of intonation. Results will be discussed in terms of loglinear models to assess the relative independence of stress versus intonation in visual judgments. [Work supported by NIH.]
Published Version
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