What the Research Says About Articulation

A seminal 1976 study (opens in new window) by Dr. Harry McGurk and Dr. John MacDonald found that speech is not a purely auditory process. When subjects listened to a single syllable and were simultaneously shown a person’s face articulating a different single syllable, they misperceived the auditory information. This audiovisual illusion is known as the McGurk Effect (opens in new window).
When learning to read words, 60 preschool children who were taught to segment phonemes with letters and pictures of articulatory gestures outperformed those who were taught to segment with letters alone, according to a 2011 study (opens in new window) by Dr. Nancy Boyer and Dr. Linnea C. Ehri. A previous study by Dr. Ehri and Dr. Maria Laura Castiglioni also showed that awareness of articulatory gestures helped activate graphophonemic connections, which improved word reading.

7. What the Research Says About Articulation