Testing the effect of audiovisual cues to prominence via a reaction-time experiment

This article discusses a perception experiment to investigate the relation between auditory and visual cues for marking prosodic prominence. The methodology makes use of a reaction-time experiment. For this experiment, recordings of a sentence with 3 accents were systematically manipulated in such a way that auditory and visual markers of prominence were either congruent (occurring on the same word) or incongruent (in that the auditory and the visual cues were positioned on different words). Subjects were instructed to indicate as fast as possible which word they perceived as the most prominent one. Classification results show first of all that subjects’ responses were much more dependent on auditory than on visual cues. In addition, however, we found that incongruent stimuli lead to slower reaction times than congruent stimuli, showing that visual cues do have an impact on the cognitive processing of prosodic prominence.