Compensation in audiovisual speech perception: Discounting the pen in the mouth

The articulation of speech segments is influenced by their phonetic context. Human speech perception seems to compensate for such coarticulatory effects, interpreting acoustic cues relative to their values expected in the current context. We test whether similar compensation is observed for visually presented, nonphonetic contexts (a pen in the mouth of a talker), as predicted by some accounts of perceptual compensation. In a series of perception experiments, we find that listeners compensate for the presence of a pen in the mouth of the talker, as long as the effects of the pen on the articulators (e.g., lip shape) are visually evident. Beyond demonstrating perceptual compensation for nonphonetic contexts, these findings also inform ongoing theoretical debates in the literature on perceptual recalibration, where similar manipulations have been found to block or reduce perceptual learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).