The role of emotionality and typicality in speechreading.
Two experiments were carried out to investigate how emotionality and typicality could influence speechreading performance. Typical and atypical sentences for a certain script, and emotional sentences (happy and sad content, presented with happy, sad or neutral facial expression) were shown without sound on a TV-screen. Two different scripts (restaurant and doctor) were used. In Experiment 1, hearing-impaired subjects participated and in Experiment 2, normal-hearing subjects participated. Experiment 2 also evaluated the effects of tactile information. The results from both experiments showed that typical restaurant sentences were the easiest to speechread of all sentence-types, in line with script-theory (Abelson, 1981; Anderson, 1983; Bellezza & Bower, 1981; Nottenburg & Shoben, 1980; Yekovich & Walker, 1986). For the doctor script, sad sentences were better speechread than happy sentences, also according to script-theory. In addition, perception of emotional content was enhanced by tactile information. Generally, both the cognitive and emotional effects are script-dependent, suggesting important social constraints on speechreading accuracy.
Johansson
K
K
Department of Education and Psychology, Linköping University, Sweden.
Rönnberg
J
J
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001288:Attention; D003638:Deafness / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008085:Lipreading; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D012813:Sign Language; D012931:Social Environment; D014110:Touch