Auditory closure with visual cues: Relationship with working memory and semantic memory

The role of working memory (WM) and long-term lexical-semantic memory (LTM) in the perception of interrupted speech with and without visual cues, was studied in 29 native English speakers. Perceptual stimuli were periodically interrupted sentences filled with speech noise. The memory measures included an LTM semantic fluency task, verbal WM, and visuo-spatial WM tasks. Whereas perceptual performance in the audio-only condition demonstrated a significant positive association with listeners' semantic fluency, perception in audio-video mode did not. These results imply that when listening to distorted speech without visual cues, listeners rely on lexical-semantic retrieval from LTM to restore missing speech information.