McGurk effect

The McGurk effect is a speech-perception illusion in which seeing one syllable articulated while hearing another can produce a third, fused percept.

Audiovisual integration: The nervous system’s combination of information from sight, hearing, and other senses into a unified percept. The effect is a clear case of visual and auditory signals shaping one speech percept.
Harry McGurk: A Scottish developmental psychologist whose research on audiovisual speech perception gave the McGurk effect its name. He co-discovered the illusion while studying how children perceive speech.
Speech-in-noise perception: The perception of spoken language when background sounds interfere with the speech signal. Visual speech can aid comprehension in noisy settings, complementing the effect’s demonstration of visual influence.
Individual differences in audiovisual speech perception: Variation among people in how visual and auditory speech signals are combined. People differ substantially in whether conflicting visual speech changes their reported syllable.
Speech perception: The processes by which listeners interpret sounds as spoken language. The illusion shows that speech perception depends on more than the sound reaching the ears.
John MacDonald: A psychologist who co-discovered the McGurk effect with Harry McGurk. His collaboration established the effect in the original research.
Lip-reading: Inferring spoken language from visible mouth and facial movements. The effect demonstrates how lip-reading information can alter what is heard.
Phonetic context: The surrounding speech sounds and articulatory conditions that influence how a speech segment is perceived. Different syllables and visual-auditory pairings produce different strengths of the illusion.
Visual speech: Linguistic information conveyed by visible movements of the face, especially the mouth. Visible articulations can shift which speech sound listeners report hearing.
Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices: A 1976 paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald reporting that visual speech can alter auditory speech perception. This paper introduced the illusion through conflicting audiovisual syllables.

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