Autistic children (AC) show less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task, which correlates with their reduced mouth-looking time. The present study examined whether AC's less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task could be increased by increasing their mouth-looking time. We recruited 4- to 8-year-old AC and nonautistic…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of visually presented speech envelope information with various modulation rates and depths on audiovisual speech perception in noise. Method: Forty adults (21.25 ± 1.45 years) participated in audiovisual sentence recognition measurements in noise. Target speech sentences were auditorily presented in…

By synthesizing existing behavioural studies through a meta-analytic approach, the current study compared the performances of Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing groups in audiovisual speech integration and investigated potential moderators that might contribute to the heterogeneity of the existing findings. In total, nine…

Purpose: Because reading is an audiovisual process, reading impairment may reflect an audiovisual processing deficit. The aim of the present study was to test the existence and scope of such a deficit in adult readers with dyslexia. Method: We tested 39 typical readers and 51 adult readers with dyslexia on their sensitivity to the simultaneity of…

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to examine the neural mechanisms associated with increases in speech intelligibility brought about through alphabet supplementation. Method: Neurotypical participants listened to dysarthric speech while watching an accompanying video of a hand pointing to the 1st letter spoken of each word on an alphabet…

Purpose: We sought to examine the contribution of visual cues in audiovisual identification of consonants and vowels--in terms of isolation points (the shortest time required for correct identification of a speech stimulus), accuracy, and cognitive demands--in listeners with hearing impairment using hearing aids. Method: The study comprised 199…

Traditionally, second language (L2) instruction has emphasised auditory-based instruction methods. However, this approach is restrictive in the sense that speech perception by humans is not just an auditory phenomenon but a multimodal one, and specifically, a visual one as well. In the past decade, experimental studies have shown that the…

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language…

Purpose: The effect of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the perception of audiovisual speech in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) was investigated by varying the noise level and the sound intensity of acoustic speech. The main hypotheses were that the McGurk effect (in which incongruent visual speech alters the…

Atypical communicative abilities are a core marker of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A number of studies have shown that, in addition to auditory comprehension differences, individuals with autism frequently show atypical responses to audiovisual speech, suggesting a multisensory contribution to these communicative differences from their…

Purpose: Auditory perception of vowels in background noise is enhanced when combined with visually perceived speech features. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the influence of visual cues on vowel perception extends to incongruent vowels, in a manner similar to the McGurk effect observed with consonants. Method:…

Using a referent detection paradigm, we examined whether listeners can determine the object speakers are referring to by using the temporal alignment between the motion speakers impose on objects and their labeling utterances. Stimuli were created by videotaping speakers labeling a novel creature. Without being explicitly instructed to do so,…

Speech perception involves the integration of auditory and visual articulatory information, and thus requires the perception of temporal synchrony between this information. There is evidence that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty with auditory speech perception but it is not known if this is also true for the…

Adults across cultures speak to infants in a specific infant-directed manner. We asked whether infants use this manner of speech (infant- or adult-directed) to guide their subsequent visual preferences for social partners. We found that 5-month-old infants encode an individuals' use of infant-directed speech and adult-directed speech, and use this…