title: Audiovisual sentence recognition not predicted by susceptibility to the McGurk effect.
abstract: In noisy situations, visual information plays a critical role in the success of speech communication: listeners are better able to understand speech when they can see the speaker. Visual influence on auditory speech perception is also observed in the McGurk effect, in which discrepant visual information alters listeners' auditory perception of a spoken syllable. When hearing /ba/ while seeing a person saying /ga/, for example, listeners may report hearing /da/. Because these two phenomena have been assumed to arise from a common integration mechanism, the McGurk effect has often been used as a measure of audiovisual integration in speech perception. In this study, we test whether this assumed relationship exists within individual listeners. We measured participants' susceptibility to the McGurk illusion as well as their ability to identify sentences in noise across a range of signal-to-noise ratios in audio-only and audiovisual modalities. Our results do not show a relationship between listeners' McGurk susceptibility and their ability to use visual cues to understand spoken sentences in noise, suggesting that McGurk susceptibility may not be a valid measure of audiovisual integration in everyday speech processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.|Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.|Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA.
authors.forename: Kristin J
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Van Engen
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Zilong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA. bchandra@utexas.edu.
authors.forename: Bharath
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Chandrasekaran
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Audiovisual speech perception; McGurk effect; Speech perception in noise