This study investigated language factors in the use of visual information in speech perception in Mandarin-Chinese, Thai, Japanese and English, languages differing in their use of tone information. Adult participants were presented with the stimuli /ba/, /da/, /ga/ spoken by two English and two Mandarin-Chinese speakers. A syllable identification task was presented in auditory, visual and audiovisual (congruent and incongruent) conditions in clear and in noise. Chinese listeners used visual information in audiovisual speech processing to the same extent as English listeners, and the magnitude of the McGurk effect was the same across both groups in the noisy condition. Japanese and Thai participants showed a stronger McGurk effect in clear condition, which might be caused by the foreign-language effect as all speakers were non-native for them. The hypothesis that a lower reliance on visual cues is found for tone languages is not supported by these results.