)

When listening to the video for this exercise, I cannot hear the different words: The sounds seem nearly continuous (although I can hear the speaker take breaths). However, it is also true that simply because I cannot distinguish the words being spoken here does not mean that other people could not. Some people are linguistically incredibly gifted and I believe that they might be much better than I am at distinguishing word segmentation, especially at recognizing the phonetic clues that signal the beginning of a new word.

In the video of the McGurk Effect, I hear the man saying "ba." I continue to hear this no matter what combination of seeing and listening I apply. The illusion -- the mismatch between sound and hearing -- results from the fact that we combine visual and auditory cues in decoding speech.

Question Seven: The Aha! Moment

Surely everyone has had the...
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