Using eye-tracking to measure the uptake of fine phonetic detail during speech perception
* Presenting author
Abstract:
In order to understand spoken language, listeners have to quickly and continuously evaluate the incoming acoustic signal and map it onto prelexical and lexical representations. Eye-tracking makes use of listeners' behavior to spontaneously fixate on visual referents to spoken input allowing us to track speech perception in real-time in a closely time-locked fashion. Importantly, fixations on referents are triggered even by a partial match between the acoustic signal and the referent label. The amount and duration of fixations depends on the precise phonetic properties in the speech signal and the degree to which they are used in perception by a given speaker of a given language. Consequently, fixations can be taken as a measure of which words listeners unconsciously (temporarily) consider to be heard at any given time as the speech signal unfolds, and which phonetic cues modulate this process. The presentation will give a brief introduction to the method and provide examples of two studies on the use of temporal information during spoken-word recognition to illustrate how eye-tracking is a fruitful method to investigate how listeners process speech in real-time.