Visual recalibration of auditory speech identification:A McGurk aftereffect

The kinds of aftereffects, indicative of cross-modal recalibration, that are observed after exposure to spatially incongruent inputs from different sensory modalities have not been demonstrated so far for identity incongruence. We show that exposure to incongruent audiovisual speech (producing the well-known McGurk effect) can recalibrate auditory speech identification. In Experiment 1, exposure to an ambiguous sound intermediate between /aba/ and /ada/ dubbed onto a video of a face articulating either /aba/ or /ada/ increased the proportion of /aba/ or /ada/ responses, respectively, during subsequent sound identification trials. Experiment 2 demonstrated the same recalibration effect or the opposite one, fewer /aba/ or /ada/ responses, revealing selective speech adaptation, depending on whether the ambiguous sound or a congruent nonambiguous one was used during exposure. In separate forced-choice identification trials, bimodal stimulus pairs producing these contrasting effects were identically categorized, which makes a role of postperceptual factors in the generation of the effects unlikely.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

The effects of alphabetic-reading competence on language representation in bilingual Chinese subjects

The metaphonological abilities of two groups of bilingual Chinese adults residing in the Netherlands were examined. All subjects were able to read Chinese logograms, but those in the alphabetic group had, unlike those in the non-alphabetic group, also acquired some competence in reading Dutch. In Experiment 1, strong, significant differences between the two groups were obtained in the task of deleting the initial consonant of a Dutch spoken pseudo-word and also in a task consisting of segmenting a sentence into progressively smaller fragments, but there was no difference in a rhyme-nonrhyme classification task with pairs of Dutch words. In the latter task, the subjects in the two groups performed at a near-ceiling level. In Experiment 2, a significant difference was obtained again for the consonant-deletion task and no difference with an initial syllabic-vowel-deletion task, but the non-alphabetic subjects performed at a significantly lower level than the alphabetic subjects in the rhyme-judgement task. Taken together, these results are consistent with the earlier evidence that learning a non-alphabetic orthography does not promote awareness of the segmental structure of utterances. On the other hand, they confirm, for a population of Chinese readers, the conclusion drawn earlier from work with illiterate subjects that explicit instruction is more critical for the development of segmental representations of language than of representations of higher levels such as those of rhymes and syllables. © 1993 Springer-Verlag.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe