Visual speech acts differently than lexical context in supporting speech perception.

The speech signal is often badly articulated, and heard under difficult listening conditions. To deal with these problems, listeners make use of various types of context. In the current study, we examine a type of context that in previous work has been shown to affect how listeners report what they hear: visual speech (i.e., the visible movements of the speaker's articulators). Despite the clear utility of this type of context under certain conditions, prior studies have shown that visually driven phonetic percepts (via the "McGurk" effect) are not "real" enough to affect perception of later-occurring speech; such percepts have not produced selective adaptation effects. This failure contrasts with successful adaptation by sounds that are generated by lexical context-the word that a sound occurs within. We demonstrate here that this dissociation is robust, leading to the conclusion that visual and lexical contexts operate differently. We suggest that the dissociation reflects the dual nature of speech as both a perceptual object and a linguistic object. Visual speech seems to contribute directly to the computations of the perceptual object but not the linguistic one, while lexical context is used in both types of computations.