Word Recognition in Speechreading
Lynne E. Bernstein and Edward T. Auer, Jr.
House Ear Institute, 2100 West Third Street, Los Angeles California
Abstract
The customary approaches to research on human speechreading are to study
phonetic perception with identification of phonemes in nonsense syllables, and
to study perception of connected discourse with identification of words in
isolated sentences. These two approaches imply a theory that accounts for
speechreading in terms of bottom-up phoneme perception and top-down
syntactic/semantic processes. However, in auditory spoken language
understanding research, word recognition is widely accepted as the critical
interface between phonetic input processing and semantic/syntactic
processing. In this chapter, a general theoretical approach to word
recognition based on auditory speech perception is described, and it is argued
that the same model should hold for speechreading. Analyses of two
speechreading databases (Bernstein, Demorest, & Tucker, 1995; Demorest,
Bernstein, & DeHaven, 1995) were examined for evidence that word
recognition does play a critical role in speechreading. The results show high
associations between the ability to speechread isolated words and words in
sentences, but only low-to-moderate associations between phoneme and word
identification (i.e., for words in isolation or in sentences). One implication
of these results is that the course of mental events in phoneme identification
is at best a subset of those events that result in word recognition. More
importantly, the results support the suggestion that word recognition deserves
increased attention in efforts to understand speechreading.
Marcus E. Hennecke marcus.hennecke@vs.dasa.de
Last modified: Fri Apr 19 10:34:22 1996