Congruent and Incongruent Audiovisual Cues to Prominence

The current paper addresses the effect of auditory and visual information on the perception of accents. The research consists of two perception experiments in which we present video clips of recorded speakers as stimuli to listeners. The first experiment tests whether listeners can detect the accented syllable in a sequence of three nonsense syllables, which are presented to subjects in three conditions (audio+vision, vision alone, audio alone). The second experiment exploits so-called mixed stimuli, i.e., artificially constructed three-syllable utterances that have conflicting auditory and visual cues to accents. Results from these two studies confirm earlier findings that there are indeed visual cues to accents, but these appear to have weaker cue value than auditory information.