Developmental Change in Infants' Detection of Visual Faces that Match Auditory Vowels

Abstract

Infants demonstrate robust audiovisual (AV) perception, detecting, for example, which visual face matches auditory speech in many paradigms. For simple phonetic segments, like vowels, previous work has assumed developmental stability in AV matching. This study shows dramatic differences in matching performance for different vowels across the first year of life: 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐month‐olds were familiarized for 40 sec with a visual face articulating a vowel in synchrony with auditory presentations of that vowel, but crucially, the mouth of the face was occluded. At test, infants were shown two still photos of the same face without occlusion for 1 min in silence. One face had a static articulatory configuration matching the previously heard vowel, while the other face had a static configuration matching a different vowel. Three auditory vowels were used: /a/, /i/, and /u/. Results suggest that AV matching performance varies according to age and to the familiarized vowel. Interestingly, results are not linked to the frequency of vowels in auditory input, but may instead be related to infants' ability to produce the target vowel. A speculative hypothesis is that vowel production in infancy modulates AV vowel matching.

Infants’ statistical word segmentation in an artificial language is linked to both parental speech input and reported production abilities

“…From a theoretical point of view, the regression results showed that our babbling measure taken at 8 months of age explains variance in individual statistical segmentation ability above and beyond that of measures of speech input is that speech perception and production develop in tandem. This interpretation is in line with recent research on infants supporting the notion that the ability to produce certain sounds is linked to various measures of speech perception (e.g., -Mackensen, Mani, & Grossmann, 2016;DePaolis, Vihman, & Nakai, 2013;DePaolis et al, 2011;Majorano, Vihman, & DePaolis, 2014;Streri, Coulon, Marie, & Yeung, 2016). In the current study, better segmentation abilities might have led to better specified phonological representations and syllable productions.…”

“…This interpretation is in line with recent research on infants supporting the notion that the ability to produce certain sounds is linked to various measures of speech perception (e.g.,Altvater-Mackensen, Mani, & Grossmann, 2016;DePaolis, Vihman, & Nakai, 2013;DePaolis et al, 2011;Majorano, Vihman, & DePaolis, 2014;Streri, Coulon, Marie, & Yeung, 2016). This interpretation is in line with recent research on infants supporting the notion that the ability to produce certain sounds is linked to various measures of speech perception (e.g.,Altvater-Mackensen, Mani, & Grossmann, 2016;DePaolis, Vihman, & Nakai, 2013;DePaolis et al, 2011;Majorano, Vihman, & DePaolis, 2014;Streri, Coulon, Marie, & Yeung, 2016).…”

Learning Spoken Words via the Ears and Eyes: Evidence from 30-Month-Old Children

“…The pseudo-words were selected to afford maximum distinctiveness in both the auditory and visual modalities (see Binnie et al, 1974 ; Jackson et al, 1976 for phonetic confusion matrices). These contrasted by at least two features in each segment (manner, place and voicing for the consonants, backness, height and roundness for the vowels) and could be easily discriminated by 30-month-old children ( Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1982 ; Patterson and Werker, 2003 ; Desjardins and Werker, 2004 ; Werker and Curtin, 2005 ; Pons et al, 2009 ; Yeung and Werker, 2013 ; Tsuji and Cristia, 2014 ; Streri et al, 2016 ).…”

“…As they enter the world, infants are sensitive to the dynamic properties of faces ( Guellaï et al, 2011 ) and can link specific movements of the visual articulators to the auditory speech signal across different dimensions (temporal: Lewkowicz and Pons, 2013 ; Baart et al, 2014 , spectral: Kuhl et al, 1991 ). For instance, when presented with a side-by-side display of two talking faces producing two different vowels, and using the auditory track of a single vowel, infants spontaneously look more at the face which matches the auditory track (i.e., by 2 months for vowels: Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1982 ; Patterson and Werker, 2003 ; Streri et al, 2016 ; by 6 months for consonants: Pons et al, 2009 ). Infants do not merely associate auditory and visible speech, but can integrate both sets of information.…”

“…Second, there is evidence from speech perception studies that audio-visual processing of non-sense forms (sounds, sound combinations, pseudo-words) continues to improve throughout childhood. For example, audio-visual matching is not consistently found for certain vowels until 9 months ( Altvater-Mackensen et al, 2016 ; Streri et al, 2016 ) and for sine-wave speech until 6 years ( Baart et al, 2015 ). Further, infants (i.e., at 4 months: Desjardins and Werker, 2004 ) and school-age children from three to 8 years old are less amenable to the McGurk illusion than older children (i.e., at 11 years) and adults and are more likely to have an auditory capture (i.e., /ba/) of the conflict (i.e., auditory /ba/ and visual /ga/; McGurk and MacDonald, 1976 ; Sekiyama and Burnham, 2008 ).…”