The organization and reorganization of audiovisual speech perception in the first year of life

Abstract

The period between six and 12 months is a sensitive period for language learning during which infants undergo auditory perceptual attunement, and recent results indicate that this sensitive period may exist across sensory modalities. We tested infants at three stages of perceptual attunement (six, nine, and 11 months) to determine 1) whether they were sensitive to the congruence between heard and seen speech stimuli in an unfamiliar language, and 2) whether familiarization with congruent audiovisual speech could boost subsequent non-native auditory discrimination. Infants at six- and nine-, but not 11-months, detected audiovisual congruence of non-native syllables. Familiarization to incongruent, but not congruent, audiovisual speech changed auditory discrimination at test for six-month-olds but not nine- or 11-month-olds. These results advance the proposal that speech perception is audiovisual from early in ontogeny, and that the sensitive period for audiovisual speech perception may last somewhat longer than that for auditory perception alone.

Cascading and Multisensory Influences on Speech Perception Development

“…When presented with side‐by‐side images of a face silently articulating either an /a/ or an /i/ vowel, infants 2 and 4 months old look longer to the face that matches the vowel they hear (Kuhl & Meltzoff, ; Patterson & Werker, ; Patterson & Werker, ). This ability extends to the matching of heard and seen consonants (Pons, Lewkowicz, Soto‐Faraco, & Sebastián‐Gallés, ; see also Danielson, Bruderer, Kandhadai, Vatikiotis‐Bateson, & Werker, ). An event‐related potential study that examined the neural responses to auditorily presented phonemes when primed either with auditory speech (unimodal) or silent visual articulation of the same sound (crossmodal) showed that, indeed, 3‐month‐old infants showed a similar response pattern to both unimodal and crossmodal priming conditions.…”

“…When 6‐month‐old Spanish‐learning infants were habituated to either auditory /va/ or /ba/, a phonetic contrast not present in Spanish, they showed a preference to look longer toward the visual speech that matched what they heard; however, 11‐month‐old infants did not. Thus, by the time infants reach 1 year of age, they are no longer sensitive to AV matching in non‐native speech (Pons et al, ; for related findings, see Danielson et al, ). In sum, multisensory speech perception also undergoes perceptual reorganization with experience.…”

Perceptual beginnings to language acquisition

“…For example, when shown two side-by-side faces of the same person, one producing an /i/ and the other an /a/, infants will look to the side that matches what they hear when presented with an auditory /i/ or /a/. Preferential looking to the match in the first 6 months of life is seen not only for native speech but also for nonnative speech sounds (Danielson, Bruderer, Kandhadai, Vatikiotis-Bateson, & Werker, 2017; Kubicek et al, 2014; Pons, Lewkowicz, Soto-Faraco, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2009).…”

Language experience influences audiovisual speech integration in unimodal and bimodal bilingual infants

“…This ERP finding suggests that young infants can perceive audiovisual incongruence similarly to adults, although this integration may be less robust in infants than in adults and more restricted to certain stimulus combinations (Desjardins & Werker, ). Moreover, it has been observed that 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants could detect audiovisual incongruences in a non‐native phonological contrast, but this sensitivity was not observed in 11‐month‐old infants (Danielson, Bruderer, Kandhadai, Vatikiotis‐Bateson, & Werker, ). These results suggest that audiovisual speech perception follows a pattern of perceptual attunement in the first year of life.…”