Audiovisual speech perception: Moving beyond McGurk.

Although it is clear that sighted listeners use both auditory and visual cues during speech perception, the manner in which multisensory information is combined is a matter of debate. One approach to measuring multisensory integration is to use variants of the McGurk illusion, in which discrepant auditory and visual cues produce auditory percepts that differ from those based on unimodal input. Not all listeners show the same degree of susceptibility to the McGurk illusion, and these individual differences are frequently used as a measure of audiovisual integration ability.

Using the DRM paradigm to assess language processing in monolinguals and bilinguals.

Both languages are jointly activated in the bilingual brain, requiring bilinguals to select the target language while avoiding interference from the unwanted language. This cross-language interference is similar to the within-language interference created by the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm (DRM; Roediger & McDermott, 1995, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21[4], 803-814). Although the mechanisms mediating false memory in the DRM paradigm remain an area of investigation, two of the more prominent theories-implicit associative response (IAR) and fuzzy trace-provide frameworks for using the DRM paradigm to advance our understanding of bilingual language processing.

Effects of age, word frequency, and noise on the time course of spoken word recognition.

This study assessed the effects of age, word frequency, and background noise on the time course of lexical activation during spoken word recognition. Participants (41 young adults and 39 older adults) performed a visual world word recognition task while we monitored their gaze position. On each trial, four phonologically unrelated pictures appeared on the screen.

An age-related deficit in resolving interference: Evidence from speech perception.

The presence of noise and interfering information can pose major difficulties during speech perception, particularly for older adults. Analogously, interference from similar representations during retrieval is a major cause of age-related memory failures. To demonstrate a suppression mechanism that underlies such speech and memory difficulties, we tested the hypothesis that interference between targets and competitors is resolved by suppressing competitors, thereby rendering them less intelligible in noise.

Age-related differences in inhibitory control predict audiovisual speech perception.

Audiovisual (AV) speech perception is the process by which auditory and visual sensory signals are integrated and used to understand what a talker is saying during face-to-face communication. This form of communication is markedly superior to speech perception in either sensory modality alone. However, there are additional lexical factors that are affected by age-related cognitive changes that may contribute to differences in AV perception.