COURS DES PAUSES ACOUSTIQUES: Les performances de sujets français et grecs

Since coarticulation is one of the basic phenomena in speech production, the issue that speech perception could take advantage of it, is of course a very fundamental one. The main questions we address in this paper are, more specifically: (i) Could speech perception benefit from anticipatory-and perseverative- coarticulation when it is clearly visible, but inaudible, as in the case of vowel rounding (protrusion/retraction) along acoustic silent pauses, which occur naturally in discourse? (ii) Could speakers of a language like Greek, who do not have linguistically significant rounding contrasts, as in French, take the same visual advantage of coarticulation? Our results show that: (i) Rounding anticipation can be identified reliably (95 % correct), only by eye, up to 120 milliseconds before any perceivablc sound; but b is identification pcrseverate no more than 40-60 ms afker sound utterance. (ii) The comparison between French and Greek subjects did not revcal significant differences in their identification behaviour, neither for anticipatory, nor perseverative coarticulation. Wether rhese results argue for a universal lipreading skill, rcmains of course an open qucst. «In face-to-face communication speech can be "seen " before ir is heard [s.p.n.], visual cues €rom lip movements may exist in somc cases hundreds of milliseconds before the corresponding auditory stimulus». Cette affirmation récent