Looking at tongues – can it help in speech perception?

This paper describes the contribution to speech perception given by animations of intra-oral articulations. 18 subjects were asked to identify the words in acoustically degraded sentences in three different presentation modes: acoustic signal only, audiovisual with a front view of a synthetic face and an audiovisual with both front face view and a side view, where tongue movements were visible by making parts of the cheek transparent. The augmented reality sideview did not help subjects perform better overall than with the front view only, but it seems to have been beneficial for the perception of palatal plosives, liquids and rhotics, especially in clusters.