Group items tagged

In one of the most viral Twitter stories of 2018, people listened to the same acoustically-degraded audio clip of a word, and hotly debated which was the correct word: laurel or yanny. What's the reason for the diametrically-opposed discrepancy? The poor quality of the audio, likely re-recorded multiple times, makes it more open to interpretation by the brain, says Brad Story, a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona. Primary information that would be present in a high-quality recording or in person is "weakened or attenuated," Story says, even as the brain is eagerly looking for patterns to interpret. "And if you throw things off a little bit, in terms of it being somewhat unnatural, then it is possible to fool that perceptual system and our interpretation of it," says Story. Story says the two words have similar patterns that easily could be confused. He carried out his own experiment by analyzing a waveform image of the viral recording and compared it to recordings of himself saying "laurel" and "yanny." He noticed similarities in the features of these words, which you can see below. Both words share a U-shaped pattern, though they correspond to different sets of frequencies that the vocal tract produces, Story explains. Britt Yazel, a neuroscience post-doctoral student at UC Davis, also provides more reasons for why people are hearing different things. Some people have greater sensitivity to higher frequencies or lower frequencies, Yazel says. "But not only that, the brains themselves can be wired very differently to interpret speech," he says. For example, if you hear the sounds in either "yanny" or "laurel" more in your everyday life, you might be more likely to hear them here. In other words, your brain may be primed and predisposed to hearing certain sounds, due to environmental exposure.