title: Effects of Congenital Visual Deprivation on the Auditory Perception of Anticipatory Labial Coarticulation.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  It has been shown previously that congenitally blind francophone adults had higher auditory discrimination scores than sighted adults. It is unclear, however, if, compared to their sighted peers, blind speakers display an increased ability to detect anticipatory acoustic cues. In this paper, this ability is investigated in both speaker groups.
  
  
  METHODS
  Using the gating paradigm, /izi/ and /izy/ sequences were truncated to include a variable duration of the vowel. The sequences were used as stimuli in an auditory identification test. Seventeen congenitally blind adults (9 females and 8 males) and 17 sighted controls were recruited. Their task was to identify the second vowel of the sequence.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results show that all participants could reliably identify the rounded vowel prior to its acoustic onset, but steeper identification slopes were found for sighted listeners than for blind listeners.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The difference in identification slopes likely suggests that sighted speakers display finer abilities to perceptually follow the decreasing values of the frication noise, compared to blind speakers.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de phonx00E9;tique, Universitx00E9; du Qux00E9;bec x00E0; Montrx00E9;al, Center for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, Montreal, Que., Canada.
authors.forename: Lucie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ménard
authors.forename: Marie-Agnès
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Cathiard
authors.forename: Emilie
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Troille
authors.forename: Marilyn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Giroux
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D059031:Anticipation, Psychological; D001766:Blindness / Q000151:congenital* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*