Les illusions McGurk dans la parole : 25 ans de recherches

Summary : The McGurk illusions in speech: 25years of research. When presented with an auditory /b/ dubbed onto a visual /g/, listeners perceive sometimes a fused phoneme like /d/ whereas with the reverse presentation, they experience a combination such as /bg/. These two kinds of illusions were reported by McGurk and MacDonald (1976). The aim of this paper is to review research on the McGurk effect and on the underlying cognitive processes. Different experimental manipulations that are likely to modulate the size of the effect are examined, such as spatial separation and temporal desynchronisation between the signals, vocalic and consonantic environment, articulation rate, stimulus quality, cognitive influences and cross-linguistic differences. Datafrom studies bearing on the issue of the level of processing at which audiovisual integration occurs relative to phonetic categorization are considered. The place of the McGurk effect in current theories of speech perception is also discussed, as well as the development of the effect during childhood, and finally the possible cerebral bases. Key words : audiovisual integration, speech reading, speech perception