Audiovisual Speech Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Auditory-Visual Superadditivity Compensates for Age-Related Declines in Audible and Lipread Speech Intelligibility

Multisensory input can improve perception of ambiguous unisensory information. For example, speech heard in noise can be more accurately identified when listeners see a speaker's articulating face. Importantly, these multisensory effects can be superadditive to listeners' ability to process unisensory speech, such that audiovisual speech identification is better than the sum of auditory-only and visual-only speech identification. Age-related declines in auditory and visual speech perception have been hypothesized to be concomitant with stronger cross-sensory influences on audiovisual speech identification, but little evidence exists to support this. Currently, studies do not account for the multisensory superadditive benefit of auditory-visual input in their metrics of the auditory or visual influence on audiovisual speech perception. Here we treat multisensory superadditivity as independent from unisensory auditory and visual processing. In the current investigation, older and younger adults identified auditory, visual, and audiovisual speech in noisy listening conditions. Performance across these conditions was used to compute conventional metrics of the auditory and visual influence on audiovisual speech identification and a metric of auditory-visual superadditivity. Consistent with past work, auditory and visual speech identification declined with age, audiovisual speech identification was preserved, and no age-related differences in the auditory or visual influence on audiovisual speech identification were observed. However, we found that auditory-visual superadditivity improved with age. The novel findings suggest that multisensory superadditivity is independent of unisensory processing. As auditory and visual speech identification decline with age, compensatory changes in multisensory superadditivity may preserve audiovisual speech identification in older adults.