DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Seeing Is Perceiving, Even When It Is Speech

Hearing by Eye II: Advances in the Psychology of Speechreading and Auditory-Visual Speech
Edited by Ruth Campbell, Barbara Dodd, and Denis Burnham. Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1998. 319 pp. Cloth, $80.

Although the use of visual information for speech has been known to be effective for decades—silent movie actors were occasionally fired for having said rude things on camera even when their comments did not appear in the titles—it was not until the serendipitous discovery of McGurk and McDonald that we learned that vision affects speech even when the auditory signal is clearly present. This discovery has led to a productive exploration of just what it means to say that speech is an acoustic signal and to examine the types of information that can be used visually to influence speech perception.