McGurk Effect - Other Languages

Other Languages

People of all languages rely to some extent on visual information in speech perception, but the intensity of the McGurk effect can change between languages. Dutch, English, Spanish, German and Italian language listeners experience a robust McGurk effect, while it is weaker for Japanese and Chinese listeners. Most research on the McGurk effect between languages has been conducted between English and Japanese. There is a smaller McGurk effect in Japanese listeners than in English listeners. The cultural practice of face avoidance in Japanese people may have an effect on the McGurk effect, as well as tone and syllabic structures of the language. This could also be why Chinese listeners are less susceptible to visual cues, and similar to Japanese, produce a smaller effect than English listeners. Studies have also shown that Japanese listeners do not show a developmental increase in visual influence after the age of six, as English children do. Japanese listeners are more able to identify an incompatibility between the visual and auditory stimulus than English listeners are. This result could be in relation to the fact that in Japanese, consonant clusters do not exist. In noisy environments where speech is unintelligible, however, people of all languages resort to using visual stimuli and are then equally subject to the McGurk effect. The McGurk effect works with speech perceivers of every language for which it has been tested.