

The results demonstrated a significant McGurk effect for isolated clicks. The study employed click sounds which are perceived as nonspeech by many English listeners, but function as consonants in certain African languages. One research study conducted four experiments to decide whether optic information influences the judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events and speech events (Brancazio, Best & Fowler, 2006). Eventually, however, they realized that the phenomenon stemmed not from a mistake by the technician but from an idiosyncrasy in human perception.Įxternal Factors Impacting the McGurk Effect In the experiment, they directed a technician to dub, with the auditory syllable “ba,” a videotape with a visual of “ga.” When the dubbed tape was played, MacDonald and McGurk perceived “da”-a phoneme distinct from both the dubbed audio and the visual.īoth McGurk and MacDonald were confused. This effect was accidentally discovered while McGurk and his assistant, MacDonald, were conducting a study on the perception of language by infants at various developmental stages.ĭuring the study, they would, in one location, play the video of a mother speaking, and in another location, play the sound of her voice. The McGurk effect was first introduced in 1976 by the cognitive psychologists, Harry McGurk and John MacDonald in a paper titled, Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976). While a combination of poor auditory stimuli and high-quality ocular information may constitute a common source of the McGurk effect, a multiplicity of factors influence the magnitude this phenomenon. This pairing subsequently induces the perception of a third sound. Herein, the optical component of one sound is coupled with the audial component of another sound. In other words, it is an illusion which occurs in the interaction between vision and hearing in the perception of speech.


The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon which happens when a person perceives that the movement of another individual’s lips do not match up with what that individual is actually saying.
