title: Language familiarity modulates relative attention to the eyes and mouth of a talker.
abstract: We investigated whether the audiovisual speech cues available in a talker's mouth elicit greater attention when adults have to process speech in an unfamiliar language vs. a familiar language. Participants performed a speech-encoding task while watching and listening to videos of a talker in a familiar language (English) or an unfamiliar language (Spanish or Icelandic). Attention to the mouth increased in monolingual subjects in response to an unfamiliar language condition but did not in bilingual subjects when the task required speech processing. In the absence of an explicit speech-processing task, subjects attended equally to the eyes and mouth in response to both familiar and unfamiliar languages. Overall, these results demonstrate that language familiarity modulates selective attention to the redundant audiovisual speech cues in a talker's mouth in adults. When our findings are considered together with similar findings from infants, they suggest that this attentional strategy emerges very early in life.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology/Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, United States. Electronic address: elan.barenholtz@fau.edu.
authors.forename: Elan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Barenholtz
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, United States.
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mavica
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, United States.
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Lewkowicz
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005123:Eye; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009055:Mouth; D019303:Multilingualism; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Attention; Language; Multisensory; Perception; Speech