Asperger syndrome (AS) is a lifelong developmental disorder of social interaction and behaviour. It belongs to the continuum of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Individuals with ASD are reported to have difficulties in interpreting sensory information, but the research information on the
topic, especially of multisensory perception, is still sparse. Speech is a good example of multisensory process. In the present study we studied audiovisual speech perception by utilising the McGurk effect in which conflicting visual articulation alters perception of heard speech.
Furthermore, as atypical use of eye gaze is a feature in ASD, we registered eye gaze during speech perception (recognition of consonants /k/, /p/, /t/) in 16 adult individuals with AS. Results were compared with age, gender and IQ (WAIS-R) matched control group. The preliminary
analysis suggests that it was more difficult for individuals with AS to read visual speech and especially, they were less influenced by visual speech in the audiovisual condition. Furthermore, according to the preliminary analysis, AS group focused less on the mouth area, during the speech recognition task.