Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP'99) August 7-10, 1999 Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Lexical Influences on the McGurk effect

Lawrence Brancazio

Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

The purpose of this research was to explore the interrelationship of audiovisual speech perception and spoken word recognition. I tested whether an index of audiovisual integration, the "McGurk effect," would be influenced by the lexical status of the stimuli. There was a significant increase in the McGurk effect when the visually-influenced percept formed a word than when it formed a nonword, and an increase in the effect when the auditory stimulus was a nonword compared to when it was a word. A second experiment ruled out a response-bias account of these findings by demonstrating a similar effect in nonword stimuli that differed in their number of word "neighbors." I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of audiovisual speech perception.

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Bibliographic reference.  Brancazio, Lawrence (1999): "Lexical influences on the McGurk effect", In AVSP-1999, paper #11.