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The McGurk Effect | ||
Tags: Gestures/Body Language | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5479 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 16 02 November 2010 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This video about the McGurk Effect shows how our eyes can
deceive our ears. It started me thinking about language learning: a friend once told me he pays close attention to people's lip movements when they talk, whereas I noticed that I rarely do. I wonder if this has an impact on language learning. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5029 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 2 of 16 02 November 2010 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I pay huge attention to the mouth,facial expressions and body language when people are speaking, especially if they have an accent I want to emulate. Sometimes you do have to explain you are studying their accent as intense studying of their face could cause alarm or at least give the wrong message.
At least it did in a bar in Naples when the young lady thought I was way more interested in her than I really was. Oops. A few grappa straightened it out. It's also not good to let 'foreign' body language and gestures slip into your native language as you get very strange looks from folk. Edited by maydayayday on 02 November 2010 at 4:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5821 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 16 02 November 2010 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's easy to forget how hard it was to learn to use a telephone. When I was really young I had problems understanding people on the phone who I talked to face-to-face without problems.
Also, if you believe V.S. Ramachandran, speech is neither visual nor audial in nature -- it's spacial. We speak by making shapes and gestures with our mouths, and we understand by mentally reconstructing the shapes of the other person's speech. It makes sense that vision (as our main means of experiencing space) should override hearing when it comes to differences in lip movement. The importance of the ear is in detecting things the eye cannot see. As the majority of variables in sound production are internal and therefore can't be seen, the importance of hearing is increased. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6513 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 16 02 November 2010 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't believe V.S. Ramachandran, if that's what he says - but in the Wikipedia article about him it is other themes that are mentioned: phantom limbs, optical illusions etc. Not language (EDIT: however it appears that he has proposed that language arose thorugh some kind of synaesthesia).
To me it is obvious that language remains language if you put the speaker behind a screen, but you have to study hard to learn to understand speech just from the lip movements. Written texts are also language, and even though there are micromovements they are just the result of seeing some language in written form first - and there is no reason to believe that they are essential for understanding the text. Otherwise speed reading would be impossible. Nonverbal communication is however more than just lip and tongue movements, and it is clear that you can get a lot of information from staring at talking faces - for instance to check whether people lie or not. Apparently that is revealed by minute muscle movements, which are very hard to control. Edited by Iversen on 02 November 2010 at 7:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5000 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 16 02 November 2010 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's a fascinating effect, but I very much doubt it has any connection to language learning. I suspect it's related to survival or something , e.g. "believe your eyes not your ears when that tiger is creeping up on you". If vision had anything to do with language, we could expect blind people to be disadvantaged, but clearly they're not.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5258 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 6 of 16 02 November 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree, it is quite fascinating (when there were two images together, I was hearing both 'ba' and 'va' ), but I don't think it has some crucial connection with language learning. What is happening, I think, is more some kind of side effect of brain's complexity: blind and deaf people can learn a language just like a hearing, seeing person, but if all your senses are functional - brain will make more connections, simply 'because it can', introducing this lip-movement, spacial dimension, into speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5821 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 16 02 November 2010 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, because there's lots of movements that aren't visible that are involved in language -- vocalisation, aspiration, tongue position (leading to nasalisation), glottals. But lipreading is language too, it's just that with so many hidden variables, accent is a bigger hurdle and you're really on more assumptions about language, so dialectal forms and non-native patterns will be a bigger problem. (All language relies on assumptions and probabilities.) My point isn't that it's one or the other, but that it's both or either or neither. The visual and audial channels are just mediums -- the message can be carried better in the audial channel alone than in the visual channel alone, but the two channels together are complementary. Both channels have strengths, both have weaknesses. Helen Keller learned to talk by touch alone. OK, she wasn't easy to understand, but she was talked without ever having heard anything. And sign language is language, despite never ever being heard. On the other hand, whistled languages such as Silbo Gomero are completely specialised to audio -- you would only use them when talking to someone to far away to see. Language can be experienced through any combination of touch, hearing and vision (and comic sci-fi authors like to postulate the existence of smell languages), so language in general is channel independent. I'm arguing that spoken language differs from whistled language and sign language in that it allows the use of both channels simultaneously, but can be understood by the audio channel only if required.
According to scientists, that's a myth. They say that it is actually easier to tell if someone is lying over the phone than face-to-face, because the visual cues of surface muscles distract you from what's going on in their voice, which brings us back to McGurk.... Edited by Cainntear on 02 November 2010 at 9:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6513 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 16 03 November 2010 at 2:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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According to some scientists it may be a myth. But there are others who have specialized in finding involuntary ticks that reveal when people lie, and there are also some TV 'magicians' who claim that they use such information. But this is a different discussion than the one about the role of bodily movements in language.
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