The Role of the Auditory and Visual Modalities in the Perceptual Identification of Brazilian Portuguese Statements and Echo Questions

International audienceThis paper presents the results of three perceptual experiments investigating the role of auditory and visual channels for the identification of statements and echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese. Ten Brazilian speakers (five male) were video-recorded (frontal view of the face) while they produced a sentence ("Como você sabe"), either as a statement (meaning "As you know.") or as an echo question (meaning "As you know?"). Experiments were set up with the two different intonation contours. Stimuli were presented in conditions with clear and degraded audio as well as congruent and incongruent information from both channels. Results show that Brazilian listeners were able to distinguish statements and questions prosodically and visually, with auditory performances being dominant over visual ones. In noisy conditions, the visual channel improved the interpretation of prosodic cues robustly, while it degraded them in conditions where the visual information is incongruent with the auditory information. This study confirms the previous findings on auditory and visual integration within speech perception, also when applied to prosodic patterns