DiscussionIn the present study, the behavioral and cortical properties of the McGurk effect and its sensitivity to different SOAs were investigated. A strong McGurk effect was observed in the behavioral data. The McGurk effect in our research sample was biased toward right visual lead and auditory lag in the ID and SJ tasks. This is consistent with the typical McGurk visual bias found by Wassenhove et al. (2007) and Munhall et al. (1996). This suggests that our brains are used to reduce differences in onset times between auditory and visual stimuli. As mentioned earlier, light travels faster than sound, but both primarily come from the same source as the auditory stimulus. Our brain adapts to this and forms a perception that unites these stimuli. (Fuijisaki, Shimojo, Kashino & Nishida, 2004). However, some degree of flexibility in multisensory processing was found by Powers, Hillock, and Wallace (2009). They stated that psychopathology is sometimes accompanied by this impaired multisensory processing. We found an increase in auditory bias among participants who scored higher on autistic characteristics. An asymmetry toward the left side of the curve for the identification task was noted, indicating impaired perception of McGurk in this population. A similar result of this auditory bias was found by Donohue, Darling, and Mitroff (2012) on a simultaneous judgment task. It was stated that greater sensitivity to auditory stimuli would result in higher priority and longer processing time, resulting in simultaneous perception of when an auditory stimulus leads the visual stimulus. Sensitivity to auditory stimuli is illustrated by Greenspan and Weider (1997), who found that their entire sample of autistic participants reported...... middle of paper ......e dominant than the effect of audiovisual (i.e. phonetic) change. This could be justified by the results revealing mainly a visual MMN result on audiovisual data. Furthermore, in addition to the above, only SOAs in which the visual stimulus preceded the auditory stimulus were tested in the EEG experiment. This visual change effect could have canceled out the delayed audiovisual effect. In previous research, neither a visual nor an auditory MMN was elicited when the audiovisual MMN was found (Colin, Radeau, & Deltenre, 2001; Colin et al., 2002; Saint-amour et al., 2007) . To conclude, it remains important to continue research in this area in order to better understand the phonetic pathway and audiovisual processing. Further research into the behavioral and cortical mechanisms of McGurk in the healthy and clinical population is needed.