title: Visual Context Enhanced: The Joint Contribution of Iconic Gestures and Visible Speech to Degraded Speech Comprehension.
abstract: This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech comprehension have only been performed separately.
  
  
  
  Twenty participants watched videos of an actress uttering an action verb and completed a free-recall task. The videos were presented in 3 speech conditions (2-band noise-vocoding, 6-band noise-vocoding, clear), 3 multimodal conditions (speech + lips blurred, speech + visible speech, speech + visible speech + gesture), and 2 visual-only conditions (visible speech, visible speech + gesture).
  
  
  
  Accuracy levels were higher when both visual articulators were present compared with 1 or none. The enhancement effects of (a) visible speech, (b) gestural information on top of visible speech, and (c) both visible speech and iconic gestures were larger in 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding or visual-only conditions. Gestural enhancement in 2-band noise-vocoding did not differ from gestural enhancement in visual-only conditions.
  
  
  
  When perceiving degraded speech in a visual context, listeners benefit more from having both visual articulators present compared with 1. This benefit was larger at 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding, where listeners can benefit from both phonological cues from visible speech and semantic cues from iconic gestures to disambiguate speech.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The NetherlandsDonders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Linda
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Drijvers
authors.affiliation: Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The NetherlandsDonders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The NetherlandsMax Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Asli
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Özyürek
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D008046:Lip; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D009039:Motion Perception; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult