THE ROLE OF EMOTIONALITY AND TYPICALITY IN SPEECHREADING

Two experiments were carried out to investigate how emotionality and typicality could influence speechreading performance. Typical and atypical sentences for a certain script, and emotional sentences (happy and sad content, presented with happy, sad or neutral facial expression) were shown without sound on a TV-screen. Two different scripts (restaurant and doctor) were used. In Experiment 1, hearing-impaired subjects participated and in Experiment 2, normal-hearing subjects participated. Experiment 2 also evaluated the effects of tactile information. The results from both experiments showed that typical restaurant sentences were the easiest to speechread of all sentence-types, in line with script-theory (Abelson, 1981; Anderson, 1983; Bellezza & Bower, 1981; Nottenburg & Shoben, 1980; Yekovich & Walker, 1986). For the doctor script, sad sentences were better speechread than happy sentences, also according to script-theory. In addition, perception of emotional content was enhanced by tactile information. Generally, both the cognitive and emotional effects are script-dependent, suggesting important social constraints on speechreading accuracy.