title: An exploration of why preschoolers perform differently than do adults in audiovisual speech perception tasks.
abstract: Preschoolers' perception of audiovisual speech is considerably less influenced by visual information than adults'. We test the hypothesis that experience correctly producing consonants plays a role in developing the underlying representation which mediates the perception of visible speech. We divided preschoolers into two groups: those who made substitution errors and those who did not. Using a newly developed methodology, we tested substituters, nonsubstituters, and adults in an auditory-only condition, a visual-only condition, and an audiovisual condition. There were no differences among groups in the auditory-only condition. Overall, children still showed less visual influence than adults. Among the children, substituters were poorer at lip-reading in the visual-only condition and showed less visual influence on the incongruent audiovisual tokens than did nonsubstituters. These results support our hypothesis that experience correctly producing consonants plays a role in the elaboration of the underlying representation.
authors.affiliation: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
authors.forename: R N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Desjardins
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rogers
authors.forename: J F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Werker
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002652:Child Behavior; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception; D014796:Visual Perception