Intermodal Perception of Adult and Child Faces and Voices by Infants

Bahrick, Lorraine E.; Netto, Dianelys; Hernandez‐Reif, Maria

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998.tb06210.x

Cited by 65 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…The rationale for a child talker was to increase attention and interest for child participants. Our informal experience with children and formal evidence in infants (Bahrick, Netto, & Hernandez-Reif, 1998) suggest a strong preference for child over adult faces. The recording setting was the Audiovisual Stimulus Preparation Laboratory of the University of Texas at Dallas with recording equipment, sound-proofing, and supplemental lighting and reflectors.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Developmental shifts in children’s sensitivity to visual speech: A new multimodal picture–word task

Jerger

Damian

Spence

et al. 2009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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This research developed a Multimodal Picture Word Task for assessing the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by100 children between 4 -14 yrs of age. We assessed how manipulation of seemingly to-be-ignored auditory (A) and audiovisual (AV) phonological distractors affected picture naming without participants consciously trying to respond to the manipulation. Results varied in complex ways as a function of age and type and modality of distractors. Results for congruent AV distractors yielded an inverted U-shaped function with a significant influence of visual speech in 4-yr-olds and 10-14-yr-olds, but not in 5-9-yr-olds. In concert with dynamic systems theory, we proposed that the temporary loss of sensitivity to visual speech was reflecting reorganization of relevant knowledge and processing sub-systems, particularly phonology. We speculated that reorganization may be associated with 1) formal literacy instruction and 2) developmental changes in multimodal processing and auditory perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive skills. KeywordsPicture-Word Task; Audiovisual Speech Perception; U-Shaped Developmental Function; Phonological Processing; Picture-Word Interference; Picture Naming; Multimodal Speech Processing; Dynamic Systems Theory Speech communication by adults is naturally a multimodal event with auditory and visual speech integrated mandatorily. This basic property of mature speech perception is dramatically illustrated by McGurk effects (McGurk & McDonald, 1976). In the McGurk task, individuals hear a syllable whose onset has one place of articulation while seeing a talker simultaneously mouthing a syllable whose onset has a different place of articulation, e.g., auditory /ba/ and visual /ga/. Adults typically experience the illusion of perceiving /da/ or /ða/, a blend of the auditory and visual inputs. The McGurk illusion is consistent with the idea that auditory and visual speech interact prior to the classification of phonetic features, such as place of Address correspondence to: Susan Jerger, Ph.D., School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, P. O. Box 830688, GR4.1, Richardson, TX 75083-0688. Phone -972-883-2268; FAX -972-883-2491; sjerger@utdallas.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. (Green, 1998). Integrating auditory and visual speech without conscious effort clearly has adaptive value. Seeing a talker's face facilitates listening in noisy soundscapes and in clear environments containing unfamiliar or complex content (Arnold & Hill, 2001;MacLeod & Summerfield, 1987;Massaro, 1998). NIH Publ...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Developmental shifts in children’s sensitivity to visual speech: A new multimodal picture–word task

Jerger

Damian

Spence

et al. 2009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…For example, 10‐ to 16‐week‐old infants looked longer to a video clip of an adult speaking a nursery rhyme that maintained lip–voice synchrony compared to an event where the movements of the lips and occurrence of speech were asynchronous by 400 ms (Dodd, 1979). Likewise numerous studies demonstrate within the first 3–6 months of life infants detect differences in temporal audio‐visual synchrony within the context of everyday objects and events (e.g., Bahrick, 1992; Bahrick, Netto, & Hernandez‐Reif, 1998; Lewkowicz, 1992a,b, 1996; Scheier, Lewkowicz, & Shimojo, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Neural signatures of face–voice synchrony in 5‐month‐old human infants

Hyde

Jones

Flom

et al. 2011

Developmental Psychobiology

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Infants' unitary perception of their multisensory world, including learning from people (faces and speech), hinges on temporal synchrony. Despite its importance, relatively little work has investigated the brain processes involved in infants' perception of temporal synchrony. In two experiments, we examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to asynchronous and synchronous audio-visual speech in infants. Both experiments showed the early auditory P2 was greater for the synchronously presented pairings and later attentional processing (Nc) was greater for asynchronous pairings. In addition, dynamic stimuli used in Experiment 2 produced a greater early visual response (N1) to the asynchronous condition and an enhanced memory-related slow wave (PSW) later for the synchronous condition. These results suggest that, like adults, auditory-visual integration for young infants begins early during sensory processing rather than later during higher-level cognitive processing. However, unlike adults, infants' brain responses may be biased towards synchrony. Furthermore, effects of attentional and memory processing confirm interpretations of behavioral looking patterns suggesting infants find synchrony more familiar.

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“…Because older infants process information more quickly than younger infants (Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2002) and have had more experience with the faces and actions of adults, we reasoned that they would show improved ability to detect faces in the context of actions. Further, infants appear to show significant improvement in a variety of related face processing skills between 4 and 7 months of age, including categorization of faces on the basis of gender (emerges at 6 months; Newell & Strauss, 2002), intermodal matching of dynamic faces and voices on the basis of gender (improves from 4 to 6 months; Walker-Andrews et al, 1991), matching specific faces and voices of unfamiliar adults (present at 7 but not 5 months; Bahrick et al, 1998), discriminating the static face of a peer from that of the self (present at 8 but not 5 months; Bahrick et al, 1996), and discriminating affect in dynamic, speaking faces across increasingly more difficult contexts (4-month-olds show audiovisual discrimination, 5-month-olds show auditory discrimination, and 7-month-olds show visual discrimination; Flom & Bahrick, 2007). Experiment 3 thus assessed whether infants of 7 months would discriminate the faces as well as the actions following the short familiarization time (160 s).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This required discriminating the two faces, discriminating the two voices, and detecting a relation between them. Infants of 4 to 8 months of age also match faces and voices on the basis of gender and age (Bahrick, Netto, & Hernandez-Reif, 1998; Patterson & Werker, 2002; Walker-Andrews, Bahrick, Raglioni, & Diaz, 1991). Further, Bahrick and colleagues found that infants discriminated the faces of unfamiliar women engaged in unimodal visual speech by 2 months of age and in bimodal audiovisual speech by 3 months of age (Bahrick, Lickliter, Vaillant, Shuman, & Castellanos, 2004a, 2004b).…”

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confidence: 99%

Infant discrimination of faces in naturalistic events: Actions are more salient than faces.

Bahrick

Newell

2008

Developmental Psychology

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Despite the fact that faces are typically seen in the context of dynamic events, there is little research on infants' perception of moving faces. L. E. Bahrick, L. J. Gogate, and I. Ruiz (2002) demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminate and remember repetitive actions but not the faces of the women performing the actions. The present research tested an attentional salience explanation for these findings: that dynamic faces are discriminable to infants, but more salient actions compete for attention. Results demonstrated that 5-month-old infants discriminated faces in the context of actions when they had longer familiarization time (Experiment 1) and following habituation to a single person performing 3 different activities (Experiment 2). Further, 7-month-old infants who have had more experience with social events also discriminated faces in the context of actions. Overall, however, discrimination of actions was more robust and occurred earlier in processing time than discrimination of dynamic faces. These findings support an attentional salience hypothesis and indicate that faces are not special in the context of actions in early infancy.

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Intermodal Perception of Adult and Child Faces and Voices by Infants

Cited by 65 publications

References 66 publications

Developmental shifts in children’s sensitivity to visual speech: A new multimodal picture–word task

Developmental shifts in children’s sensitivity to visual speech: A new multimodal picture–word task

Neural signatures of face–voice synchrony in 5‐month‐old human infants

Infant discrimination of faces in naturalistic events: Actions are more salient than faces.

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