A brief review of relevant phenomena occurring in bimodal speech perception is presented to show that communication systems must consider psycholinguistic factors in the conception of optimally efficient devices. This paper presents VisoLab, a highly convivial multimedia environment for the study of bimodal speech perception. VisioLab is conceived to provide researchers with relevant data on labial dynamics and geometry, as well as the corresponding acoustic information, of the utterances they intend to study. In addition, VisioLab enables the quantification of the perceptual effects resulting from the manipulation of the film quality (fps, dimension, definition and resolution of the image) and sound (sampling frequency, number of bits, signal to noise ratio), and/or their respective display timings. VisioLab is therefore a useful tool for the study of bimodal speech phenomena and for testing the effects on message comprehension due to technical problems arising in communication systems.
Keywords: bimodal speech perception, visual and acoustic information, multimedia, sound and video-editing, QuickTime