Intermodal timing relations and audio-visual speech recognition by normal-hearing adults

Abstract

Audio-visual identification of sentences was measured as a function of audio delay in untrained observers with normal hearing; the soundtrack was replaced by rectangular pulses originally synchronized to the closing of the talker’s vocal folds and then subjected to delay. When the soundtrack was delayed by 160 ms, identification scores were no better than when no acoustical information at all was provided. Delays of up to 80 ms had little effect on group-mean performance, but a separate analysis of a subgroup of better lipreaders showed a significant trend of reduced scores with increased delay in the range from 0–80 ms. A second experiment tested the interpretation that, although the main disruptive effect of the delay occurred on a syllabic time scale, better lipreaders might be attempting to use intermodal timing cues at a phonemic level. Normal-hearing observers determined whether a 120-Hz complex tone started before or after the opening of a pair of liplike Lissajou figures. Group-mean difference limens (70.7% correct DLs) were −79 ms (sound leading) and +138 ms (sound lagging), with no significant correlation between DLs and sentence lipreading scores. It was concluded that most observers, whether good lipreaders or not, possess insufficient sensitivity to intermodal timing cues in audio-visual speech for them to be used analogously to voice onset time in auditory speech perception. The results of both experiments imply that delays of up to about 40 ms introduced by signal-processing algorithms in aids to lipreading should not materially affect audio-visual speech understanding.