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Can’t hear clearly without glasses?—A Preliminary Study on Multisensory Integration in Language Processing

Yao Wang

Advances in Linguistics Research / 2026,8(2): 151-170 / 2026-06-08 26 14

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• Information:

  School of Liberal Arts, Shandong University, Jinan, China

• Keywords:
  Unclear Hearing When Taking Off the Glasses; Audio-Visual Integration; Multisensory Integration; Cognitive Load
• Abstract: Based on the design experiment of Multisensory Integration theory and Cognitive Load theory, this paper studies the phenomenon of “unclear hearing when taking off the glasses”. The experimental results show that visual blurring reduces auditory processing accuracy, and factors such as usage frequency will also have a significant impact on this phenomenon. The study found that this phenomenon is mainly caused by two reasons: first, multisensory integration is disrupted, and visual blur interferes with the integration of multisensory information; second, the cognitive load increases, and the brain needs to allocate more resources to process blurred visual information, resulting in a decrease in auditory processing resources. In addition, the higher usage frequency, the less obvious the loss of hearing, which also reflects the role of semantic expectations in auditory understanding. Building upon this, a counterintuitive finding was also observed: under complete visual blurring, individuals with moderate-to-high myopia unexpectedly outperform those with mild myopia, particularly when processing low-frequency corpora. This highlights the interaction between the long-term visual compensation mechanism and top-down semantic expectations. This study also explores individual differences, which provides a new perspective for understanding the multisensory integration mechanism of human beings, and has enlightening significance for the design of rehabilitation strategies for the visually impaired.
• DOI: (DOI application in progress)
• Cite: Wang, Y. (2026). Can’t hear clearly without glasses?—A Preliminary Study on Multisensory Integration in Language Processing. Advances in Linguistics Research, 8 (2), 151-170.