Interleaved lexical and audiovisual information can retune phoneme boundaries

Such adjustment can draw on contextual, including lexical, information in surrounding speech, or on visual cues via speech- reading. In the present study, listeners proved able to flexibly adjust the boundary between two plosive/stop consonants, /p/-/t/, using both lexical and speech-reading information and given the same experimental design for both cue types.

Videos of a speaker pronouncing pseudo-words, and audio recordings of Dutch words, were presented in alternating blocks of either stimulus type, and listeners were able to switch between cues to recalibrate, with effect sizes comparable to results from listeners receiving only a single source of information. Overall, audiovisual cues (i.e., the videos) produced the stronger after-effects, commensurate with their environmental applicability.