Abstract
It has been shown that lipreaders can distinguish between word pairs such as ‘‘perFECT’’ and ‘‘PERfect.’’ An experimental evaluation of synthetic worked pairs showed that mouth opening and segmental duration are important cues [Levitt, Lin, and Lin (in preparation)]. A phonetic contrast that depends heavily on subtle changes in segmental duration is that of juncture. It was of interest to determine whether word pairs such as ‘‘ill eagle’’ vs ‘‘illegal’’ or ‘‘a name’’ vs ‘‘an aim’’ are visually distinguishable. Two versions of each contrast pair spoken by a male speaker with normal vocal effort were recorded for a set of 67 pairs. The recordings were lipread by eight subjects. Results showed that most of the contrasts were distinguishable. Correct responses were quite consistent between two recordings. Accuracy of the responses was affected by consonant type: both pre-juncture and post-juncture. Further, judgments were found to be biased by frequency of occurrence and linguistic factors. [Work supported by NIDCD.]
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