Auditory-Visual Integration during the Perception of Spoken Arabic

This thesis aimed to investigate the effect of visual speech cues on auditory-visual integration during speech perception in Arabic. Four experiments were conducted two of which were cross linguistic studies using Arabic and English listeners. To compare the influence of visual speech in Arabic and English listeners chapter 3 investigated the use of visual components of auditory-visual stimuli in native versus non-native speech using the McGurk effect. The experiment suggested that Arabic listeners’ speech perception was influenced by visual components of speech to a lesser degree compared to English listeners. Furthermore, auditory and visual assimilation was observed for non-native speech cues. Additionally when the visual cue was an emphatic phoneme the Arabic listeners incorporated the emphatic visual cue in their McGurk response. Chapter 4, investigated whether the lower McGurk effect response in Arabic listeners found in chapter 3 was due to a bottom-up mechanism of visual processing speed. Chapter 4, using auditory-visual temporal asynchronous conditions, concluded that the differences in McGurk response percentage was not due to bottom-up mechanism of visual processing speed. This led to the question of whether the difference in auditory-visual integration of speech could be due to more ambiguous visual cues in Arabic compared to English. To explore this question it was first necessary to identify visemes in Arabic. Chapter 5 identified 13 viseme categories in Arabic, some emphatic visemes were visually distinct from their non-emphatic counterparts and a greater number of phonemes within the guttural viseme category were found compared to English. Chapter 6 evaluated the visual speech influence across the 13 viseme categories in Arabic measured by the McGurk effect. It was concluded that the predictive power of visual cues and the contrast between visual and auditory speech components will lead to an increase in the McGurk response percentage in Arabic.