How children and adults produce and perceive uncertainty in audiovisual speech

audiovisual speech We describe two experiments on signaling and detecting uncertainty in audiovisual speech by adults and children. In the first study, utterances from children adult speakers and child speakers (aged 7-8) were elicited and annotated Feeling of Another's with a set of six audiovisual features. It was found that when adult speakers Knowing were uncertain they were more likely to produce fillers, delays, high intonation, eyebrow movements, and "funny faces." The basic picture for the child Feeling of Knowing speakers was somewhat similar, in that the presence of certain audiovisual cues correlated with uncertainty, but the differences were relatively small question answering and less often significant. In the second study both adult and child judges watched responses from adult and child speakers selected from the first study speech perception to find out whether they were able to correctly estimate a speakers' level of speech production uncertainty. It was found that both child and adult judges gave more accurate scores for answers from adult speakers than from child speakers and that uncertainty child judges overall provided less accurate scores than adult judges.