Children’s age matters, but not for audiovisual speech enhancement

Abstract

Articulation movements help us identify speech in noisy environments. While this has been observed at almost all ages, the size of the perceived benefit and its relationship to development in children is less understood. Here, we focus on exploring audiovisual speech benefit in typically developing children (N = 160) across a wide age range (4–15 years) by measuring performance via an online audiovisual speech performance task that is low in cognitive and linguistic demands. Specifically, we investigated how audiovisual speech benefit develops over age and the impact of some potentially important intrinsic (e.g., gender, phonological skills) and extrinsic (e.g., choice of stimuli) experimental factors. Our results show an increased performance of individual modalities (audio-only, audiovisual, visual-only) as a function of age, but no difference in the size of audiovisual speech enhancement. Furthermore, older children showed a significant impact of visually distracting stimuli (e.g., mismatched video), where this had no additional impact on performance of the youngest children. No phonological or gender differences were found given the low cognitive and linguistic demands of this task.