  Prosody plays a vital role in verbal communication. Acoustic cues of prosody
have been examined extensively. However, prosodic characteristics are not only
perceived auditorily, but also visually based on head and facial movements. The
purpose of this report is to present a method for examining audiovisual prosody
using virtual reality. We show that animations based on a virtual human provide
motion cues similar to those obtained from video recordings of a real talker.
The use of virtual reality opens up new avenues for examining multimodal
effects of verbal communication. We discuss the method in the framework of
examining prosody perception in cochlear implant listeners.
