It was first described in 1976 in a paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald, titled "Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices" in "Nature" (23 December 1976). This effect was discovered by accident when McGurk and his research assistant, MacDonald, asked a technician to dub a video with a different phoneme from the one spoken while conducting a study on how infants perceive language at different developmental stages. When the video was played back, both researchers heard a third phoneme rather than the one spoken or mouthed in the video.