Nowadays, more and more conversations are conducted via technical aids, such as computers or mobile phones. In technology, there can be connection or processing problems that lead to disturbances in playback. As a result, audio and video signals, for example, are time-delayed, which can be noticeable and disturbing. Since short-term memory is needed, especially in speech comprehension, to extract information from what is said, the question is to what extent these imperceptible and noticeable time offsets have an influence on short-term memory. To answer this, a serial recall task was designed to investigate the effect of the delays on short-term memory. In this task, participants are presented with items that they must recall in the same order as presented. The auditory stimuliwere spoken numbers and the visual stimuli were the lip movements during pronunciation. In addition to conditions in which the auditory and visual stimuli were presented separately, there were audiovisual conditions in which the stimuli were delayed with respect to each other by up to 400 ms. On the one hand, no significant effect of the delays was observed in short-term memory performance. On the other hand, it was observed that the participants performed significantly worse in the visual condition. These results suggest that the lip movements were not read well. Furthermore, this could have caused the delays to be noticeable but not irritating due to the inaccuracy in lip reading. Nevertheless, participants might have achieved comparable results with more effort.

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