Abstract:

Much research has been devoted to the study of whether lexical knowledge affects lower-level phonetic processing. For example, in the Ganong effect (Ganong, JEP:HPP 6, 110--125), the lexical status of the end points of a /b/--/p/ voicing continuum affects the point at which a shift from /b/ to /p/ responses is made (e.g., more /b/ responses in a /bif/--/pif/ continuum than in a /bis/--/pis/ one). This study addresses whether lexical effects influence the perception of discrepant audiovisual stimuli (the McGurk effect). Pairs of words and nonwords were constructed that differed only in the place of articulation of the initial phoneme; in each pair either both members were words, only one was a word, or neither was a word. The stimuli were presented audiovisually, with the audio from one pair member and the video from the other; subjects identified the intial phoneme. Analyses of a proportion of video responses (McGurk responses) indicated significant effects of the lexical status of the auditorily-presented token and of the visually-presented token: the McGurk effect was stronger when the video token was a word, and weaker when the audio token was a word. Implications of these findings will be discussed.