Silencing Sharapova's Grunt Improves the Perception of Her Serve Speed

Abstract

In recent years, grunting has become a familiar although generally unwelcome element of tennis. The behavior is considered to deny opponents the benefit of receiving optimal multi-sensory information in order to plan their own shots. The ability to make accurate serve-speed judgments of identical tennis serves presented on a computer screen, and accompanied by a grunt or not, was assessed among 38 participants (19 men). Accuracy and response time were measured. Analysis compared performance for below versus above average speed serves and for the grunt versus the no grunt condition. Grunting had a disruptive effect on serve-speed perception for below average serves, with most judged incorrectly to be above average. Response times for below average serves were also slower in the grunt condition. Grunting provides a complex perceptual challenge, and greater effort may be attributed to tennis serves with an accompanying grunt.

The sound of speed: How grunting affects opponents’ anticipation in tennis

“…Going beyond established work on the role of visual perception in anticipation [34, 35] the current findings add to reports on the relevance of auditory information for tennis players’ performance in general [18, 19] and on the influence of auditory information emanating from the RBC in particular [17, 21]. However, previous studies on the effects of grunting have typically investigated situations where grunting temporally coincided with the sound of RBC [17, 26] (for related findings in volleyball, see [22]) making it difficult to tease apart effects of multisensory integration, distraction, and blocking. Of course, we do not suggest that the blocking account put forward by these studies (i.e., the notion that grunts block relevant auditory information) is irrelevant for the effects of grunting on anticipation.…”

“…Videos edited to contain a simulated grunt resulted in longer reaction times and reduced accuracy (compared to original videos). In a similar vein, an experiment by Farhead & Punt [26] asked participants to judge the speed of actual tennis serves by tennis professional Maria Sharapova, who has been reported to produce grunts in excess of 109 dB [27]. Participants were more accurate in judging serves’ speed when Sharapova’s signature grunt was edited out.…”

Grunting's competitive advantage: Considerations of force and distraction

“…Indeed, even some of tennis’ legends (e.g., Martina Navratilova) have made the claim that grunting is essentially cheating. However, only recently has empirical evidence been offered to suggest that grunting actually confers an advantage to the grunter [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ].…”

“…Given that this sound provides the opponent with important information relative to the force with which a ball is struck as well as its spin, both of which may benefit performance, then masking the sound could lead to a reduction in performance. A recent, and dramatic demonstration of this is provided by Farhead and Punt [ 1 ]. Participants judged the speed of serves hit by professional tennis players that were presented on a computer screen.…”

Tennis grunts communicate acoustic cues to sex and contest outcome

“…Investigations of the function of tennis grunts have so far focused on their distracting quality to opponents (Farhead & Punt, 2015;Sinnett & Kingstone, 2010), and their enhancement of ball velocity without increasing oxygen cost (e.g. O'Connell, Hinman, Hearne, Michael, & Nixon, 2014).…”