sight and hearing

With sight 14
0. 4
1. 2
2. 3
3. 2
4. 1
5. 2
Total: 18f

No sight 12
0. 0
1. 6
2. 4
3. 1
4. 0
5. 0
6. 1
Total 23

Hypothesis

We think that this isn’t true because we think that when you don’t have vision you can concentrate on the sound better. Also it’s hard to lip-read and not many people can do this, so this probably won’t help in understanding someone’s speech.

Some research

McGurk and McDonald did a test where they made people hear /ba/, but see /ga/. The people were confused and thought they had heard /da/.

Prof.Dr. J. Vroomen made a test in which he made test subjects hear a sound in between /da/ and /ba/, something like /bda/. He showed one half of all the test subjects lips that said /da/ and the other half he showed lips that said /ba/. The people who saw /da/, even though they heard /bda/ thought they heard /da/ and vice versa.

Psychologist Dominic Massaro designed a computer-head that speaks and moves like a real human. By making the head say “ball” and mouth “doll”, people thought the head actually said “wall”.

All this research proves that people do lip-read. This made us change our opinion and from that point we expected that you can understand someone better when you can also look at their face.

Our own test! Research question

We made our own experiment to test our problem. Our research question was: When you turn down the sound on a video, can people who may look at the person talking understand the words at a lower volume than people who only have sound?

How did we test it?

We let half of our test subjects see and hear a video with Mr. Rutte giving a speech, and the other half only hear the same speech. We then had all test subjects fill in the blanks on a sheet with Rutte’s speech on it, but with some words missing. The sound on the video was adjusted to die out gradually.All test subjects were wearing the same headphones and the volume was equal in all tests.

Then we looked which group had, on average, filled in most blanks and thus had understood a bigger part of the speech.

Improvements

While testing, we noticed that our test-subjects were looking more at their papers than at Mr. Rutte’s face, while they were actually supposed to look at him. This was completely understandable, because of course they had to read which words they had to fill in. It would have been better to just have one word being said a a time, so they could look at the person pronouncing it and then write it down.

(Maybe we should have had more test subjects, because if you have more people the test is better because you get a better average.)

Conclusion

When you turn down the sound on a video, people who may look at the person talking can indeed understand the words at a lower volume than people who only have sound.

Seeing more people with the video were able to do it flawless and also made less mistakes in total. We can be quite sure that seeing helps you with understanding what someone else is saying.