A developmental study of audiovisual speech perception using the McGurk paradigm

Abstract

The development of audiovisual speech perception was examined in this experiment using the McGurk paradigm (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976), in which a visual recording of a person saying a particular syllable is synchronized with the auditory presentation of another syllable. Previous audiovisual speech studies have shown that adult perception is strongly influenced by the visual speech information whereas the perception of young children (5–8 years) shows a very weak influence of visual speech patterns and a strong bias favoring the auditory speech information. In this investigation 46 children in four age groups (5, 7, 9, and 11 year olds) and 15 adults were presented with conflicting audiovisual syllables in which an auditory /ba/ sequence was combined with visual /va/, /θa/, /da/, and /ga/ sequences, respectively. The results indicated that the influence of auditory information decreased with increasing age, while the influence of visual information and the integration of auditory and visual information increased across the age groups. In addition, an adult-like response pattern was observed in only half of the children in the oldest child subject group (10–12 years old) suggesting that the ability to utilize visual speech information continues to develop beyond the age of 12. [Work supported by NSERC.]