• DOI:10.1038/264746A0
• Corpus ID: 4171157

Hearing lips and seeing voices

@article{McGurk1976HearingLA,
  title={Hearing lips and seeing voices},
  author={Harry McGurk and John MacDonald},
  journal={Nature},
  year={1976},
  volume={264},
  pages={746-748}
}

• H. McGurk, J. MacDonald
• Published 23 December 1976
• Physics
• Nature

MOST verbal communication occurs in contexts where the listener can see the speaker as well as hear him. However, speech perception is normally regarded as a purely auditory process. The study reported here demonstrates a previously unrecognised influence of vision upon speech perception. It stems from an observation that, on being shown a film of a young woman's talking head, in which repeated utterances of the syllable [ba] had been dubbed on to lip movements for [ga], normal adults reported hearing [da]. With the reverse dubbing process, a majority reported hearing [bagba] or [gaba]. When these subjects listened to the soundtrack from the film, without visual input, or when they watched untreated film, they reported the syllables accurately as repetitions of [ba] or [ga]. Subsequent replications confirm the reliability of these findings; they have important implications for the understanding of speech perception.