Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study explores how native language influences audiovisual speech perception (the McGurk effect) by comparing Polish and Turkish speakers. Using a novel computational approach to quantify articulatory feature distances across diverse syllable pairs, the research reveals that Turkish speakers exhibit higher susceptibility to the effect, supporting the auditory intelligibility approach. However, the underlying audiovisual integration mechanism remains consistent across both languages. These findings suggest that while native linguistic structures modulate overall susceptibility, the articulatory drivers of speech perception are universal.