Infants' use of synchronized visual information to separate streams of speech.
In 4 studies, 7.5-month-olds used synchronized visual-auditory correlations to separate a target speech stream when a distractor passage was presented at equal loudness. Infants succeeded in a segmentation task (using the head-turn preference procedure with video familiarization) when a video of the talker's face was synchronized with the target passage (Experiment 1, N = 30). Infants did not succeed in this task when an unsynchronized (Experiment 2, N = 30) or static (Experiment 3, N = 30) face was presented during familiarization. Infants also succeeded when viewing a synchronized oscilloscope pattern (Experiment 4, N = 26), suggesting that their ability to use visual information is related to domain-general sensitivities to any synchronized auditory-visual correspondence.
Hollich
George
G
Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. ghollich@purdue.edu
Newman
Rochelle S
RS
Jusczyk
Peter W
PW
D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D002666:Psychology, Child; D013017:Sound Localization; D013067:Speech Perception; D014796:Visual Perception