In this study we examined developmental changes in responses to consistent and discrepant video and audio nonverbal cues. A videotaped Nonverbal Discrepancy Test was administered to children aged 9-15 years. The discrepancy test measures (a) decoding accuracy-the extent to which subjects are able to identify affects (positivity and dominance) from visual (facial and body) cues and audio (content-filtered and random-spliced) cues-and (b) video primacy-the extent to which subjects are more influenced by video (face or body) than by audio cues. It was found that older children were more accurate at decoding affects than were younger children, particularly dominance-submission cues. Video primacy increased with age for facial cues (but not for body cues) and for cues of positivity (but not for cues of dominance). Relative to males younger female subjects showed more video primacy and older female subjects showed less video primacy, particularly for cues of dominance-submission. Relative to younger children older children showed less video primacy in decoding extremely discrepant audio and video cues than in decoding moderately discrepant audio and video cues. The development of nonverbal sensitivity to video and audio cues is discussed.When do children develop the ability to and vocal cues and therefore provided an decode (interpret) nonverbal cues? A re view opportunity to compare sensitivity to difby Charlesworth and Kreutzer (1973) indi-ferent nonverbal channels. It was found that cated that the ability to understand facial younger subjects showed a relative adexpressions appears during the first year of vantage in decoding tone of voice as oplife and increases in a linear fashion during posed to video cues. Bugental, Kaswan, the preschool and grade-school ages. A Love, and Fox (1970) also reported that similar developmental trend has been noted video (but not audio) cues had less impact for the ability to decode vocal cues among on young children (relative to adults), pars' to 12-year-old children (Dimitrovsky, ticularly in decoding women 's positive af-1964). Recently, Rosenthal, Hall, DiMatteo, fects. It is possible, then, that the ability Rogers, and Archer (1979) found that age to understand vocal intonations develops had a linear effect on decoding accuracy prior to sensitivity to other nonverbal chanuntil accuracy starts to level off between nels, but this sensitivity decreases to some ages 20 and 30. extent during socialization (cf. Rosenthal et The research by . That is, older children may either focused on the ability to decode facial, body, pay less attention to audio cues or discount the information they gain from these cues in favor of the information they gain from