Abstract
The current study aimed to better understand the development of prosody perception, by investigating the audiovisual, audio, and visual perception of contrastive focus in French-speaking adults and children. Specifically, 20 adults and 20 school-aged children were presented with short sentences in audiovisual, audio, and visual modalities and were asked to determine if the sentences were produced under neutral or contrastive focused speech. Target words incorporated into the sentences varied across four vowels: /i y u a/. Overall, the adults performed significantly better than the children. Moreover, the children relied more on duration cues to identify contrastive focus, while the adults relied more on formant and lip height values. These findings suggest that children acquire visual cues of speech perception as they mature.
Highlights
Speech development entails the gradual mastery of orofacial articulators and the refinement of sensory processing
Onesample Student t-tests for above-chance identification indicated that the visual perception of contrastive focus significantly exceeded chance for both adults t(19) = 5.81, p < 0.001 and children t(19) = 2.4, p < 0.027
The odds of perceiving a focused constituent when lip area is enlarged are greater in adults than in children. In this investigation of the perception of contrastive focus in 20 adults and 20 school-aged children, contrastive focus was implemented in words combining four vowels (/i y u a/) across three perceptual modalities
Summary
Speech development entails the gradual mastery of orofacial articulators and the refinement of sensory processing. Specific movements of the jaw, lips, and tongue are associated with their sensory consequences. It is well-known that those consequences are multimodal. As demonstrated by many studies conducted with adults, auditory, and visual cues are involved in the perception of phonemic units (Robert-Ribes et al, 1998) as well as prosodic prominence (Dohen and Lœvenbruck, 2009). Audiovisual interaction in early speech perception has been studied in infants, little is known about changes in school-aged children. We investigated the audiovisual perception of a specific prosodic form, namely contrastive focus, in school-aged French-speaking children and adults
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