The McGurk effect is similar in native Mandarin Chinese and American English speakers

John F Magnotti ¹ Debshila Basu Mallick ² Guo Feng ³ Bin Zhou ⁴ Wen Zhou ⁴ Michael S Beauchamp ^5*

• ¹ Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• ² Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States
• ³ Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
• ⁴ Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
• ⁵ Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

Humans combine the visual information from mouth movements with auditory information from the voice to recognize speech. A common method for assessing audiovisual speech perception is the McGurk effect: when presented with some incongruent pairings of auditory and visual speech syllables (e.g., the auditory speech sound "ba" dubbed onto the visual mouth movements for "ga") individuals perceive a third syllable, distinct from the auditory and visual components. The many differences between Chinese and American culture and language suggest the possibility of group differences in the McGurk effect. Published studies have reported less McGurk effect in native Mandarin Chinese speakers than in English speakers, but these studies sampled small numbers of participants tested with a small number of stimuli. Therefore, we conducted inperson tests of the McGurk effect in large samples of Mandarin-speaking individuals from China and English-speaking individuals from the USA (total N = 307) viewing 9 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, there was high variability both across participants (range from 0% to 100%) and stimuli (14% to 83%) with the main effect of culture and language accounting for only 0.2% of the variance in the data. The high variability inherent to the McGurk effect necessitates the use of large sample sizes to accurately estimate group differences and requires testing with a variety of McGurk stimuli, especially stimuli potent enough to evoke the illusion in the majority of participants.