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…

Although spoken language is communicated via a rapidly varying signal, human listeners recognize spoken words both quickly and accurately. Nonetheless, variability in speech does have implications for both the processes and representations involved in spoken language perception. Moreover, variability effects have been observed across the lifespan,…

The speech perception system must be flexible in responding to the variability in speech sounds caused by differences among speakers and by language change over the lifespan of the listener. Indeed, listeners use lexical knowledge to retune perception of novel speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In that study, Dutch listeners made…