Title: ‘Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices’: Audio-visual speech perception over the last 40 years

Speaker: John MacDonald,Ph.D.(University of the West of Scotland)

Time: June 13 2016 (Mon) 10:30-12:00

Venue: Room 1113, Wang Kezhen Building

Although speech perception is traditionally regarded as a purely auditory process a number of studies show that viewing the lip and face movements does influence what we hear. Lip reading enhances the understanding of speech in noisy environments and for the hard of hearing. A more striking demonstration audio-visual integration in speech is the ‘McGurk’ effect where an illusory auditory percept is reported when the visual information from lip movements is different from the auditory information from the voice. This presentation will describe the discovery of the effect in 1976, and review and summarise some of the research that this discovery stimulated. Finally, some of the implications of the illusion and the research for our understanding of speech and language processing will be discussed.

Host: Lihan Chen