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Similar frequency of the McGurk effect in large samples of native Mandarin Chinese and American English speakers

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An Erratum to this article was published on 25 March 2016

Abstract

Humans combine visual information from mouth movements with auditory information from the voice to recognize speech. A common method for assessing multisensory speech perception is the McGurk effect: When presented with particular pairings of incongruent auditory and visual speech syllables (e.g., the auditory speech sounds for “ba” dubbed onto the visual mouth movements for “ga”), individuals perceive a third syllable, distinct from the auditory and visual components. Chinese and American cultures differ in the prevalence of direct facial gaze and in the auditory structure of their languages, raising the possibility of cultural- and language-related group differences in the McGurk effect. There is no consensus in the literature about the existence of these group differences, with some studies reporting less McGurk effect in native Mandarin Chinese speakers than in English speakers and others reporting no difference. However, these studies sampled small numbers of participants tested with a small number of stimuli. Therefore, we collected data on the McGurk effect from large samples of Mandarin-speaking individuals from China and English-speaking individuals from the USA (total n = 307) viewing nine different stimuli. Averaged across participants and stimuli, we found similar frequencies of the McGurk effect between Chinese and American participants (48 vs. 44 %). In both groups, we observed a large range of frequencies both across participants (range from 0 to 100 %) and stimuli (15 to 83 %) with the main effect of culture and language accounting for only 0.3 % of the variance in the data. High individual variability in perception of the McGurk effect necessitates the use of large sample sizes to accurately estimate group differences.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIH R01NS065395 to MSB.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Suite 104, Houston, TX, USA

    John F. Magnotti & Michael S. Beauchamp

  2. Department of Psychology, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Debshila Basu Mallick

  3. Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Guo Feng, Bin Zhou & Wen Zhou

Authors
  1. John F. Magnotti
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  2. Debshila Basu Mallick
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  3. Guo Feng
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  4. Bin Zhou
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  5. Wen Zhou
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  6. Michael S. Beauchamp
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Correspondence to John F. Magnotti.

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Magnotti, J.F., Basu Mallick, D., Feng, G. et al. Similar frequency of the McGurk effect in large samples of native Mandarin Chinese and American English speakers. Exp Brain Res 233, 2581–2586 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4324-7

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