Audiovisual synchrony perception of simplified speech sounds heard as speech and non-speech

Listeners without information about SWS typically perceive this sound as non-speech such as a whistle or electronic sound. In contrast, once they are informed that SWS is a synthesized speech sound based on natural speech, they perceive SWS as speech. Audiovisual synchrony is important for comfortable speech communication. Ocasionally a temporal mismatch is encountered between a speaker's face and speech sound, for instance, in a satellite broadcast or in video streaming via the Internet. They showed that participants were less sensitive to audiovisual asynchrony when the auditory and visual stimuli originated from the same speech event than when they originated from different speech events. The findings reveal the role of a purely cognitive effect in audiovisual synchrony perception, and suggest that synchrony perception might be affected by the sound discriminability. Further studies are required to reveal the relevance of the relation between audiovisual synchrony perception and stimulus discriminability.