%0 Journal Article
%A Krason, Anna
%A Zhang, Ye
%A Man, Hillarie
%A Vigliocco, Gabriella
%D 2023
%F discovery:10175872
%I Springer Science and Business Media LLC
%J Behavior Research Methods
%K Mouth and facial movements, Visual informativeness, Word recognition
%T Mouth and facial informativeness norms for 2276 English words
%U https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10175872/
%X Mouth and facial movements are part and parcel of face-to-face communication. The primary way of assessing their role in speech perception has been by manipulating their presence (e.g., by blurring the area of a speaker's lips) or by looking at how informative different mouth patterns are for the corresponding phonemes (or visemes; e.g., /b/ is visually more salient than /g/). However, moving beyond informativeness of single phonemes is challenging due to coarticulation and language variations (to name just a few factors). Here, we present mouth and facial informativeness (MaFI) for words, i.e., how visually informative words are based on their corresponding mouth and facial movements. MaFI was quantified for 2276 English words, varying in length, frequency, and age of acquisition, using phonological distance between a word and participants' speechreading guesses. The results showed that MaFI norms capture well the dynamic nature of mouth and facial movements per word, with words containing phonemes with roundness and frontness features, as well as visemes characterized by lower lip tuck, lip rounding, and lip closure being visually more informative. We also showed that the more of these features there are in a word, the more informative it is based on mouth and facial movements. Finally, we demonstrated that the MaFI norms generalize across different variants of English language. The norms are freely accessible via Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/mna8j/ ) and can benefit any language researcher using audiovisual stimuli (e.g., to control for the effect of speech-linked mouth and facial movements).
%Z This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images  or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license,  unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license,  users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this  license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/