Audiovisual speech recalibration in children.
In order to examine whether children adjust their phonetic speech categories, children of two age groups, five-year-olds and eight-year-olds, were exposed to a video of a face saying /aba/ or /ada/ accompanied by an auditory ambiguous speech sound halfway between /b/ and /d/. The effect of exposure to these audiovisual stimuli was measured on subsequently delivered auditory-only speech identification trials. Results were compared to a control condition in which the audiovisual exposure stimuli contained non-ambiguous and congruent sounds /aba/ or /ada/. The older children learned to categorize the initially ambiguous speech sound in accord with the previously seen lip-read information (i.e. recalibration), but this was not the case for the younger age group. Moreover, all children displayed a tendency to report the stimulus that they were exposed to during the exposure phase. Methodological improvements for adjusting such a response bias are discussed.
van Linden
Sabine
S
Department of Psychology, Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, Tilburg, the Netherlands.
Vroomen
Jean
J
D001307:Auditory Perception; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014796:Visual Perception