While production studies of allophonic variation are now commonplace, we still do not have a clear understanding of how and if native speakers perceive subphonemic differences. This project experimentally investigates the perception of the variable process of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Spanish and shows that, while distinct from categorical perception, allophonic perception is displayed by lis...

In this chapter, we report an investigation the influence of the saliency of another person’s direction of gaze on an observer’s eye movements through real-world scenes. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they viewed a sequence of scene photographs that told a story. A subset of the scenes contained an actor. The actor’s face was highly likely to be fixated, and when it was, the ob...

1] demonstrates that simple schematic faces evoke neural responses comparable to those evoked by photographic face stimuli. The authors argue that this shows that schematic visual stimuli may still validly represent face processing, although it has been argued that such non-photographic faces lack many of the visual properties of the human face. In this commentary I would like to elaborate on t...

Speech and emotion perception are dynamic processes in which it may be optimal to integrate synchronous signals emitted from different sources. Studies of audio-visual (AV) perception of neutrally expressed speech demonstrate supra-additive (i.e., where AV>[unimodal auditory+unimodal visual]) responses in left STS to crossmodal speech stimuli. However, emotions are often conveyed simultaneously...

Perception and evaluation of facial expressions are known to be heavily modulated by emotional features of contextual information. Such contextual effects, however, might also be driven by non-emotional aspects of contextual information, an interaction of emotional and non-emotional factors, and by the observers' inherent traits. Therefore, we sought to assess whether contextual information abo...

Current theories of emotion perception posit that basic facial expressions signal categorically discrete emotions or affective dimensions of valence and arousal. In both cases, the information is thought to be directly ‘‘read out’’ from the face in away that is largely immune to context. In contrast, the three studies reported here demonstrated that identical facial configurations convey striki...

Humans are the only species known to use symbolic gestures for communication. This affords a unique medium for nonverbal emotional communication with a distinct theoretical status compared to facial expressions and other biologically evolved nonverbal emotion signals. While a frown is a frown all around the world, the relation of emotional gestures to their referents is arbitrary and varies fro...

Facial expression plays an important role in face to face communication in that it conveys nonverbal information and emotional intent beyond speech. In this paper, an approach for facial expression synthesis with an expressive Chinese talking avatar is proposed, where a layered parametric framework is designed to synthesize intermediate facial expressions using PAD emotional parameters [5], whi...