Visual speech information improves discrimination of non‐native phonemes in late infancy.

Abstract

Initially, human infants are able to discriminate a change from one speech phoneme to another, whether or not the speech contrasts are native or foreign. By the end of the first postnatal year, the ease with which infants discriminate non‐native phonemes diminishes, indicating a progressive attunement toward language‐relevant speech. However, studies in this area have employed procedures lacking dynamic bimodal information (e.g., faces and voices). Given rapid improvements in visual perception across the first postnatal year, as well as a strong propensity to look at and process faces, it is possible that infants would benefit from visual speech in both native and non‐native perception. Across two experiments, discrimination of auditory plus visual Hindi phoneme contrasts was studied in 11‐month‐olds (English‐learning, using digital movies of female Hindi speakers). Several conditions were contrasted: (a) face plus voice using infant‐directed speech (IDS); (b) face plus voice using adult‐directed speech (...