Some auditory‐visual interactions are post‐categorical

Abstract

The McGurk effect recently has been variously conjectured to be based upon a precategorical interaction or integration of information from the auditory and visual representation of the linguistic event. The conjecture of precategorical interactions, which rejects the original notion of post‐categorical interactions, may be in the form of a specialized module for speech or language, or may contribute to a logic‐decision process, either of which leads to a relatively discrete perception of speech. While not disputing such precategorical interactions for language, the research to be described demonstrates post‐categorical interaction of auditory and visual representations of phonemes. The stimuli are nonword CVC syllables. The set of auditory stimuli is edited from natural speech, while the set of visual stimuli includes the orthographic representations of the auditory stimuli syllables. Evidence for interactions in identification of initial phonemes is based upon both error rates and reaction times. [Research supported in part by an NSF grant to the first author.]