The perception of anticipatory labial coarticulation by blind listeners in noise: A comparison with sighted listeners in audio-only, visual-only and audiovisual conditions

This study investigates the time course of the perception of the /i-y/ contrast by French-speaking blind listeners using a gating paradigm. The performances of the blind listeners in discrimination and identification are compared with the range of performances exhibited by sighted perceivers when stimuli are presented auditorily, visually and audiovisually, whether in acoustically non degraded or in noisy conditions. Results provide evidence in favor of partial compensation for visual deprivation in speech perception. Blind listeners outperformed sighted participants in discriminating between auditorily-presented gated stimuli, particularly in noisy conditions. But this small advantage allowed them to compensate only partially for their inability to exploit visual information in order to process coarticulated speech as quickly and efficiently as sighted controls.