The impact of visual cues and lexical knowledge on the perception of a non-native consonant contrast for Colombian adults

The study investigates the impact of visual cues and lexical knowledge on the identification of a nonnative phonemic contrast. Twenty native Colombians were tested on an identification task involving 16 minimal pairs of English words, produced by four English speakers, contrasting in the presence of /b/ or /v/ in initial or medial position. The test was run in three conditions: audiovisual (AV), audio only (A) or visual only (V). Prior to the identification task, their knowledge of the lexical items was evaluated; they were also recorded while reading the words. Mean identification scores were higher for the AV than the A condition, but V and AV scores not differ. Relative to previous /b/-/v/ studies with Peninsular Spanish speakers, Colombians relied more heavily on visual cues in their identification of /b/-/v/. Although there was a trend for identification scores to be higher for known lexical items, this effect was not statistically significant. Finally, production accuracy for the /b/-/v/ contrast was not correlated with perception accuracy, but production tended to be more accurate in speakers with better lexical knowledge. The visual weighting results suggest that the degree of visual bias in speech perception may be ‘culture-specific’ rather than merely ‘language-specific’.