Perceptual Doping: A Hypothesis on How Early Audiovisual Speech Stimulation Enhances Subsequent Auditory Speech Processing

Face-to-face communication is one of the most common means of communication in daily life. We benefit from both auditory and visual speech signals that lead to better language understanding. People prefer face-to-face communication when access to auditory speech cues is limited because of background noise in the surrounding environment or in the case of hearing impairment. We demonstrated that an early, short period of exposure to audiovisual speech stimuli facilitates subsequent auditory processing of speech stimuli for correct identification, but early auditory exposure does not. We called this effect “perceptual doping” as an early audiovisual speech stimulation dopes or recalibrates auditory phonological and lexical maps in the mental lexicon in a way that results in better processing of auditory speech signals for correct identification. This short opinion paper provides an overview of perceptual doping and how it differs from similar auditory perceptual aftereffects following exposure to audiovisual speech materials, its underlying cognitive mechanism, and its potential usefulness in the aural rehabilitation of people with hearing difficulties.