But what I do know, and this is very much like it, is that this is what is called “speech reading” where I use both my minimal hearing and focus on the face trying to lip read which then adds together and suddenly helps me to start getting words that I otherwise would miss.

I’ll have to look up the McGurk effect to see if it’s speech reading or something else.

Santiago: Thank you for freaking me the hell out. I’ve heard 3D sound demos before but that was just too scary, especially when they put the bag over your head.

Well, they did. Way back in 2004. Here are some of the posts in which they mentioned it:

http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000637.html
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000639.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001706.html

(Some of the links in those posts are now broken, sorry.)

I heard Charlie Brown’s teacher.

“Huh? Japanese has a perfectly normal D sound, the same as English. It doesn’t have an exact equivalent of the English R or L; it does have a sound *not* found in (American) English that can make do as a way to express R or L. But that’s its own clear sound, and isn’t “ambiguous” in the least.”

Not to belabor an off-topic point (and I see you are a fluent speaker), but, isn’t it true that in Japanese there is no “D” sound per se at all? Or any other pure consonant, for that matter – only consonant/vowel combinations (except the “n” sound). Their sound of “dah” is exactly like ours, but I don’t believe there is an equivalent of “dee” – is there a “doo”?

Anyway, what I meant by ambiguous is that it would be very hard for an English speaker to hear a difference in the Japanese pronunciation of “ray”, “lay”, or “day” (or, in this case, “rah”, “la” and “dah”).

Native English speaker “hearing” da .v. ba.

Strangely, if I try it with one eye closed and then the other I “hear” it ever so slightly differently. But only on one eye. The other eye is the same as both eyes open. I wonder if that has anything to do with hand-dominance?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsfnP9DK-Zg

I closed my eyes and heard, “No, you’re off YOUR case!”
Must be the McGarnagle effect.

“Perhaps I should turn one of you into a stopwatch.” – The McGonagall effect.

- I’m not a native english speaker, so it sounds much more like ” papa”, said with a foreign accent to me ( a word, in french that means ” daddy”, so.. I can relate the sound to a “real” allday word, so no matter what, I hear this word.. The video seems to be “gaga” wrongly dubbed to me, but I still hear the sound “papa”

- I’m a musician, so the sound comes first to me, and the video can’t trick me, as the visual perception isn’t as strong as audio. My ears dominate my eyes.

But I must admit that , on a longer example, as you posted some weeks ago ( featuring the choir singing what could be a Purcell or Haendel’s Anthem with fake subtitles), I can easily be tricked: My english skills aren’t achieved enough to “fight” the subtitles.

So greetings from France to everyone,from a geek-lady passionated by Languages, etymology, and anything that involves sound.

BTW, I’m in the Ga Ga, Ba Ba camp, though I was confused for a bit trying to find some meaning in the ‘word’ being said. Then I started reading the comments and finally understood what I was supposed to be noticing. – g^2

P.S. Glad you’re having a good time a TAM6 – I finally got around to twittering. . .

Perhaps an effect of watching too much dubbed-into-German movies and TV shows? I’m quite used to seeing lips that don’t agree with the sound.

Off-topic, but:

@Yojimbo: “What do you hear? It reminds me of the ambiguous sound the Japanese use for our R, L and D.”

Huh? Japanese has a perfectly normal D sound, the same as English. It doesn’t have an exact equivalent of the English R or L; it does have a sound *not* found in (American) English that can make do as a way to express R or L. But that’s its own clear sound, and isn’t “ambiguous” in the least.

What’s the big deal about that?!?!?! I was expecting the difference between “DaDa” and “Rotational Equilibrium”

Sorry.. just not impressed. lol