There is evidence that for both auditory and visual speech perception, familiarity with the talker facilitates speech recognition. Explanations of these effects have concentrated on the retention of talker information specific to each of these modalities. It could be, however, that some amodal, talker-specific articulatory-style information facilitates speech perception in both modalities. If this is true, then experience with a talker in one modality should facilitate perception of speech from that talker in the other modality. In a test of this prediction, subjects were given about 1 hr of experience lipreading a talker and were then asked to recover speech in noise from either this same talker or a different talker. Results revealed that subjects who lip-read and heard speech from the same talker performed better on the speech-in-noise task than did subjects who lip-read from one talker and then heard speech from a different talker.

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These results show that, like auditory speech, visual speech information can induce speech alignment to a phonetically relevant property of an utterance.

Speech alignment, the tendency of individuals to subtly imitate each other’s speaking style, is often assessed by comparing a subject’s baseline and shadowed utterances to a model’s utterances often through perceptual ratings. These types of comparisons provide information about the occurrence of a change in subject’s speech, but do not indicate that this change is towards the specific shadowed model. Three studies investigated whether alignment is specific to a shadowed model. Experiment 1 involved the classic baseline to shadowed comparison to confirm that subjects did, in fact, sound more like their model when they shadowed, relative to any pre-existing similarities between a subject and model. Experiment 2 tested whether subjects’ utterances sounded more similar to the model they had shadowed or to another unshadowed model. Experiment 3 examined whether subjects’ utterances sounded more similar to the model they had shadowed or to another subject who shadowed a different model. Results of all experiments revealed that subjects sounded more similar to the model they had shadowed. This suggests that shadowing-based speech alignment is not just a change; it is a change in the direction of the shadowed model, specifically.