title: Children perceive speech onsets by ear and eye.
abstract: Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize cognitive resources, not lack of sensitivity. We investigated sensitivity to visual speech in children via the phonological priming produced by low-fidelity (non-intact onset) auditory speech presented audiovisually (see dynamic face articulate consonant/rhyme b/ag; hear non-intact onset/rhyme: -b/ag) vs. auditorily (see still face; hear exactly same auditory input). Audiovisual speech produced greater priming from four to fourteen years, indicating that visual speech filled in the non-intact auditory onsets. The influence of visual speech depended uniquely on phonology and speechreading. Children - like adults - perceive speech onsets multimodally. Findings are critical for incorporating visual speech into developmental theories of speech perception.
authors.affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences,GR4·1,University of Texas at Dallas, andCallier Center for Communication Disorders,Richardson,Texas.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jerger
authors.affiliation: School of Experimental Psychology,University of Bristol.
authors.forename: Markus F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Damian
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery,Washington University School of Medicine.
authors.forename: Nancy
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Tye-Murray
authors.affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences,GR4·1,University of Texas at Dallas.
authors.forename: Hervé
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Abdi
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008085:Lipreading; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*