What you see isn’t always what you get: Auditory word signals trump consciously perceived words in lexical access

• Face-to-face speech involves both auditory and visual components.
• We test when auditory–visual integration occurs relative to lexical access.
• Lexical access precedes integration if the auditory signal is a real word.
• However, AV-integration still occurs as long as the two signals are compatible.
• Thus, a comprehender can lexically access one word yet consciously perceive a different word.

Human speech perception often includes both an auditory and visual component. A conflict in these signals can result in the McGurk illusion, in which the listener perceives a fusion of the two streams, implying that information from both has been integrated. We report two experiments investigating whether auditory–visual integration of speech occurs before or after lexical access, and whether the visual signal influences lexical access at all. Subjects were presented with McGurk or Congruent primes and performed a lexical decision task on related or unrelated targets. Although subjects perceived the McGurk illusion, McGurk and Congruent primes with matching real-word auditory signals equivalently primed targets that were semantically related to the auditory signal, but not targets related to the McGurk percept. We conclude that the time course of auditory–visual integration is dependent on the lexicality of the auditory and visual input signals, and that listeners can lexically access one word and yet consciously perceive another.