Audiovisual Perception of Lexical Stress: Beat Gestures and Articulatory Cues

Human communication is inherently multimodal. Auditory speech but also visual cues can be used to understand another talker. This is especially known about the perception of segments of speech (i.e., speech sounds). However, less is known about the influence of visual information on the perception of suprasegmental aspects of speech like lexical stress. This study investigated the influence of different visual information (e.g., facial cues & beat gestures) on the perception of lexical stress and found that beat gestures, but not facial cues affect lexical stress perception. These results highlight the importance of considering suprasegmental aspects of language in multimodal contexts and expand our understanding of audiovisual speech perception and integration.