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Visual Influences on Perception of Speech and Nonspeech Vocal-Tract Events

Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT, brancazioL1{at}southernct.edu, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Catherine T. Best

MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Penrith NSW, Australia, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Carol A. Fowler

University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, Yale University, New Haven, CT

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that serve as consonants in some African languages, but that are perceived as nonspeech by American English listeners. We found a significant McGurk effect for clicks presented in isolation that was much smaller than that found for stop-consonant-vowel syllables. In subsequent experiments, we found strong McGurk effects, comparable to those found for English syllables, for click-vowel syllables, and weak effects, comparable to those found for isolated clicks, for excised release bursts of stop consonants presented in isolation. We interpret these findings as evidence that the potential contributions of speech-specific processes on the McGurk effect are limited, and discuss the results in relation to current explanations for the McGurk effect.

Key Words: audiovisual speech • perception • clicks McGurk effect • nonspeech

Language and Speech, Vol. 49, No. 1, 21-53 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/00238309060490010301


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