EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing 
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 47891, 12 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/47891
Research Article

Visual Contribution to Speech Perception: Measuring the Intelligibility of Animated Talking Heads

Slim Ouni,1 Michael M. Cohen,2 Hope Ishak,2 and Dominic W. Massaro2

 1LORIA, Campus Scientifique, BP 239, Vandoeure lès Nancy Cedex 54506, France
2Perceptual Science Laboratory, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
Received 7 January 2006; Revised 21 July 2006; Accepted 21 July 2006

Recommended by Jont B. Allen

Abstract

Animated agents are becoming increasingly frequent in research and applications in speech science. An important challenge is to evaluate the effectiveness of the agent in terms of the intelligibility of its visible speech. In three experiments, we extend and test the Sumby and Pollack (1954) metric to allow the comparison of an agent relative to a standard or reference, and also propose a new metric based on the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP) to describe the benefit provided by a synthetic animated face relative to the benefit provided by a natural face. A valid metric would allow direct comparisons accross different experiments and would give measures of the benfit of a synthetic animated face relative to a natural face (or indeed any two conditions) and how this benefit varies as a function of the type of synthetic face, the test items (e.g., syllables versus sentences), different individuals, and applications.