Auditory-visual perception of acoustically degraded prosodic contrastive focus in French

Previous studies have shown that visual only perception of prosodic contrastive focus in French is possible. The aim of this study was to determine whether the visual modality could be combined to the auditory one and lead to a perceptual enhancement of prosodic focus. In order to examine this question, we carried out auditory only, audiovisual and visual only perception tests. In order to avoid a ceiling effect, auditory only perception of prosodic focus being very high, we used whispered speech for which the acoustic prosodic information is degraded. The productions of two different speakers were used. This test showed that adding the visual modality enhances auditory perception of prosodic focus when the acoustic prosodic cues are degraded.