Are words equally surprising in audio and audio-visual comprehension?

Abstract: We report a controlled study investigating the effect of visual information (i.e., seeing the speaker) on spoken language comprehension. We compare the ERP signature (N400) associated with each word in audio-only and audio-visual presentations of the same verbal stimuli. We assess the extent to which surprisal measures (which quantify the predictability of words in their lexical context) are generated on the basis of different types of LLMs (specifically n-gram and Transformer models) that predict N400 responses for each word. Our results indicate that cognitive effort differs significantly between multimodal and unimodal settings. In addition, our findings suggest that while Transformer-based models, which have access to a larger lexical context, provide a better fit in the audio-only setting, 2-gram LLMs are more effective in the multimodal setting. This highlights the significant impact of local lexical context on cognitive processing in a multimodal environment.