Cross-modal speech perception in adults and infants using nonspeech auditory stimuli.
Adults and infants were tested for the capacity to detect correspondences between nonspeech sounds and real vowels. The /i/ and /a/ vowels were presented in 3 different ways: auditory speech, silent visual faces articulating the vowels, or mentally imagined vowels. The nonspeech sounds were either pure tones or 3-tone complexes that isolated a single feature of the vowel without allowing the vowel to be identified. Adults perceived an orderly relation between the nonspeech sounds and vowels. They matched high-pitched nonspeech sounds to /i/ vowels and low-pitched nonspeech sounds to /a/ vowels. In contrast, infants could not match nonspeech sounds to the visually presented vowels. Infants' detection of correspondence between auditory and visual speech appears to require the whole speech signal; with development, an isolated feature of the vowel is sufficient for detection of the cross-modal correspondence.
Kuhl
P K
PK
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle 98195.
Williams
K A
KA
Meltzoff
A N
AN
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008085:Lipreading; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception