Abstract
Speech is a multimodal stimulus, with information provided in both the auditory and visual modalities. The resulting audiovisual signal provides relatively stable, tightly correlated cues that support speech perception and processing in a range of contexts. Despite the clear relationship between spoken language and the moving mouth that produces it, there remains considerable disagreement over how sensitive early language learners—infants—are to whether and how sight and sound co-occur. Here we examine sources of this disagreement, with a focus on how comparisons of data obtained using different paradigms and different stimuli may serve to exacerbate misunderstanding.
Highlights
The development of early speech perception abilities is often framed as an auditory-only process, speech is a sensory-rich stimulus, with information provided across multiple modalities
Our focus here is on the auditory and visual modalities, which together provide relatively stable, tightly correlated cues about the resulting speech
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that substantial fine-tuning for various forms of audiovisual processing continues throughout childhood and well into adolescence (Baart et al, 2015; Tomalski, 2015), suffice it to say that at least some primitive form of multimodal perception emerges in early infancy (Bahrick et al, 2004). This can be characterized as guided by both modal cues and amodal ones
Summary
Speech is a multimodal stimulus, with information provided in both the auditory and visual modalities. The resulting audiovisual signal provides relatively stable, tightly correlated cues that support speech perception and processing in a range of contexts. Despite the clear relationship between spoken language and the moving mouth that produces it, there remains considerable disagreement over how sensitive early language learners—infants—are to whether and how sight and sound co-occur. We examine sources of this disagreement, with a focus on how comparisons of data obtained using different paradigms and different stimuli may serve to exacerbate misunderstanding. Reviewed by: Jean Vroomen, University of Tilburg, Netherlands Clemens Wöllner, University of Hamburg, Germany. Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Sources of Confusion in Infant Audiovisual Speech Perception Research.
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