Seeing a singer helps comprehension of the song's lyrics.
When listening to speech, we often benefit when also seeing the speaker's face. If this advantage is not domain specific for speech, the recognition of sung lyrics should also benefit from seeing the singer's face. By independently varying the sight and sound of the lyrics, we found a substantial comprehension benefit of seeing a singer. This benefit was robust across participants, lyrics, and repetition of the test materials. This benefit was much larger than the benefit for sung lyrics obtained in previous research, which had not provided the visual information normally present in singing. Given that the comprehension of sung lyrics benefits from seeing the singer, just like speech comprehension benefits from seeing the speaker, both speech and music perception appear to be multisensory processes.
Jesse
Alexandra
A
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. alexandra.jesse@mpi.nl
Massaro
Dominic W
DW
D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D012683:Sensory Deprivation; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014741:Video Recording; D014796:Visual Perception; D014831:Voice