Data from: The visual speech head start improves perception and reduces superior temporal cortex responses to auditory speech

Visual information about speech content from the talker's mouth is
often available before auditory information from the talker's voice.
Previously we demonstrated that audiovisual speech selectively enhances
activity in regions of the early visual cortex representing the mouth of
the talker (Ozker et al., 2018b). Here we examined perceptual and neural
responses to words with and without this visual head start. For both types
of words, perception was enhanced by viewing the talker's face, but
the enhancement was significantly greater for words with a head start.
Neural responses were measured from electrodes implanted over auditory
association cortex in the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) of
epileptic patients. The presence of visual speech suppressed responses to
auditory speech, more so for words with a visual head start. We suggest
that the head start inhibits representations of incompatible auditory
phonemes, increasing perceptual accuracy and decreasing total neural
responses. Together with previous work showing visual cortex modulation
(Ozker et al., 2018b) these results from pSTG demonstrate that
multisensory interactions are a powerful modulator of activity throughout
the speech perception network.