The contribution of vowels to auditory-visual speech recognition and the contributions of Diane Kewley-Port to the field of speech communication

Abstract

Throughout her career, Diane Kewley-Port has made enduring contributions to the field of Speech Communication in two ways—through her research on vowels and through her mentoring. Diane has contributed greatly to current knowledge about vowel acoustics, vowel discrimination and identification, and the role of vowels in speech recognition. Within that line of research, Richie & Kewley-Port (2008) investigated the effects of visual cues to vowels on speech recognition. Specifically, we demonstrated that an auditory-visual vowel-identification training program benefited sentence recognition under difficult listening conditions more than consonant-identification training and no training. In this presentation, I will describe my continuing research on the relationship between auditory-visual vowel-identification training and listening effort, for adults with normal hearing. In this study, listening effort was measured in terms of response time and participants were tested on auditory-visual sentence recognition in noise. I will discuss the ways that my current work has been inspired by past research with Diane, and how her mentoring legacy lives on.