Article,
Hearing lips and seeing voices
Nature, (1976)
Abstract
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.
