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Abstract:
Multimodal prosody carries a wide variety of information Here, we investigated the roles of visual and the auditory information in the production and perception of different emphasis intensities.
In a series of video recordings, the intensity, location, and syntactic category of the emphasized word were varied. Physical analyses demonstrated that each speaker produced different emphasis intensities, with a high degree of individual variation in information distribution. In the first psychophysical experiment, observers easily distinguished between the different intensities.
Interestingly, the pattern of perceived intensity was
remarkably similar across speakers, despite the individual variations in the use of different visual and acoustic modalities. The second experiment presented the recordings visually, acoustically, and audiovisually. Overall, while the audio only condition was very similar to the audiovisual condition, there was a clear influence of visual information. Weak visual information lead to a weaker audiovisual intensity, while stong visual information
enhanced audiovisual intensity.
