Audiovisual Speech Scene Analysis in the Context of Competing Sources

Audiovisual fusion in speech perception is generally conceived as a process independent from scene analysis, which is supposed to occur separately in the auditory and visual domain. On the contrary, we have been proposing in the last years that scene analysis such as what takes place in the cocktail party effect was an audiovisual process. We review here a series of experiments illustrating how audiovisual speech scene analysis occurs in the context of competing sources. Indeed, we show that a short contextual audiovisual stimulus made of competing auditory and visual sources modifies the perception of a following McGurk target. We interpret this in terms of binding, unbinding and rebinding processes, and we show how these processes depend on audiovisual correlations in time, attentional processes and differences between junior and senior participants.