PERCEPTION OF CLEARLY PRESENTED FOREIGN LANGUAGE SOUNDS: THE EFFECTS OF VISIBLE SPEECH

Learning the sounds of a foreign language is difficult. The experiments reported here investigated whether visible speech can help. The focus of the experiments was on whether visible speech affects perception as well as the production of foreign speech sounds. The first experiment examined whether visible speech assists in the detection of a syllable within an unfamiliar foreign phrase. It was found that a syllable was more likely to be detected within a phrase when the participants could see the speaker's face. The second experiment investigated whether judgments about the duration of a foreign language phrase would be more accurate with visible speech compared to a sound only condition. It was found that in the visible speech condition participant's estimates of phrase duration correlated positively with actual duration, whereas in the sound only condition there was a negative correlation. Furthermore, with visible speech, estimates were close to the actual durations whereas those in the sound only condition tended to underestimate duration. The results are discussed with respect to previous findings and future applications.