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Increasing visual perceptual load can reduce pre-attentive auditory cortical activity to sounds, a reflection of the limited and shared attentional resources for sensory processing across modalities. Here, we demonstrate that modulating visual perceptual load can impact the early sensory encoding of speech sounds, and that the impact of visual load is highly dependent on the predictability of the incoming speech stream. Participants (n = 20, 9 females) performed a visual search task of high (target similar to distractors) and low (target dissimilar to distractors) perceptual load, while early auditory electrophysiological responses were recorded to native speech sounds. Speech sounds were presented either in a ‘repetitive context’, or a less predictable ‘variable context’. Independent of auditory stimulus context, pre-attentive auditory cortical activity was reduced during high visual load, relative to low visual load. We …