Visual contribution to the multistable perception of speech

The multistable perception of speech, or verbal transformation effect, refers to perceptual changes experienced while listening to a speech form that is repeated rapidly and continuously. In order to test whether visual information from the speaker's articulatory gestures may modify the emergence and stability of verbal auditory percepts, subjects were instructed to report any perceptual changes during unimodal, audiovisual, and incongruent audiovisual presentations of distinct repeated syllables. In a first experiment, the perceptual stability of reported auditory percepts was significantly modulated by the modality of presentation. In a second experiment, when audiovisual stimuli consisting of a stable audio track dubbed with a video track that alternated between congruent and incongruent stimuli were presented, a strong correlation between the timing of perceptual transitions and the timing of video switches was found. Finally, a third experiment showed that the vocal tract opening onset event provided by the visual input could play the role of a bootstrap mechanism in the search for transformations. Altogether, these results demonstrate the capacity of visual information to control the multistable perception of speech in its phonetic content and temporal course. The verbal transformation effect thus provides a useful experimental paradigm to explore audiovisual interactions in speech perception.