{"pk":49170,"title":"How Helpful is Visual Context for Speech Processing? Evidence from Multi-modal Speech Tracking in Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Visual cues like facial expressions and gestures enhance speech comprehension. While prior studies have explored L1 multimodal speech processing, research on bilinguals remains limited. Here we examine how visual context influences speech processing in monolinguals and bilinguals by assessing changes in sensitivity to different speech dimensions. EEG was recorded from 24 monolinguals and 24 bilinguals as they viewed multimodal speech clips presented in audiovisual or audio-only formats. Then, a temporal response function was applied to decode neural responses to audio envelope and surprisal to index sensitivity of acoustic and semantic information. Results show that visual context facilitated audio tracking in bilinguals but did not enhance surprisal tracking. Conversely, monolinguals benefited from visual input for surprisal tracking but not envelope tracking. These results suggest that bilinguals may allocate more cognitive resources to audio processing when integrating visual cues, potentially limiting the availability of resources for higher-level semantic processing.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kp012pd","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Haoyin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Seana","middle_name":"","last_name":"Coulson","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49170/galley/37131/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49170/galley/38676/download/"}]}