Da da da
A little gem brightened grading of our
Linguistics 1 final today.
Background: the McGurk effect involves integration of visual
information in speech comprehension, as in
this
video (and see
Sally Thomason's and
Bill Poser's LL posts too) where the sound
ba ba, ba
ba, ba ba is overlayed on a video of a man who appears visually
to be saying
ga ga, ga ga, ga ga.
If you listen and watch at the same time, you might well perceive
da da, da da, da da. Pretty damn
cool. It's surely no coincidence that the place of articulation (i.e.
where the air gets blocked) for "d" is midway between "b" and
"g". Looks to me like your fantastic mother of a brain is
interpolating multimodal evidence as to the physical air-blockage
position in realtime. For full appreciation of coolness, try the video
with eyes closed or no sound. Warning: I personally have played the
video so many times that I even perceive
da with the sound and visuals both
turned off.
da da da. It just
goes on and on.
One unfortunate student taking Linguistics 1 was sick during the
quarter. She missed the class where I explained the stuff
above, and all she had to go on was her memory of the video from the
class website. So question 9 on her final, worth 8 points, ended
up looking like this:
Question: 9. What is the
McGurk effect and what does it show? (1 brief paragraph)
Answer:
In
the video the man seemed to be repeating [daa] over and over again.
Aphasia?
How many points should I give her? For full marks she would have had to
have specified
Broca's (aka
Production)
Aphasia, right?
Tangentially, you seem like the generous type, and I have to let
someone know about my new Christmas wish: I'd do anything for a McGurk
remake of
this
bilingual Trio classic.
This is
what you need to know. Aha.
da da da
(repeat to fade)
Posted by David Beaver at December 9, 2004 02:15 AM