Showing posts with label speech perception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speech perception. Show all posts

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Say What You See Someone Saying

National Geographic Channel recently aired a 3-part special titled Brain Games which featured a segment about a speech perception phenomenon called the McGurk effect.

Here is a user-submitted recording of that segment from You Tube:



And here is a segment about the phenomenon from BBC TWO (this one is easier to view and I think it does a better job demonstrating and explaining what is happening):



The gist of the McGurk effect is that when a person's eyes see something different than what the ears hear, visual perception frequently overrules auditory perception. In other words, sight tells a person what to hear even if it is incorrect.

While not exactly the same, this reminded me of a gag children used to play when I was in elementary school. Person A would mouth the words "olive juice" to Person B. Thus, Person B would think that Person A had said "I love you".
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