Augmented Reality Talking Heads as a Support for Speech Perception and Production

Abstract

Visual face gestures, such as lip, head and eyebrow movements, are important in all human speech communication as a support to the acoustic signal. This is true even if the speaker’s face is computer-animated. The visual information about the phonemes, i.e. speech sounds, results in better speech perception (Benoit et al., 1994; Massaro, 1998) and the benefit is all the greater if the acoustic signal is degraded by noise (Benoit & LeGoff, 1998; Sumby & Pollack, 1954) or a hearing-impairment (Agelfors et al., 1998; Summerfield, 1979).