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ABSTRACT
The present study aimed to investigate the development of visual speech perception in Chinese-speaking children. Children aged 7, 13 and 16 were asked to visually identify both consonant and vowel sounds in Chinese as quickly and accurately as possible. Results revealed (1) an increase in accuracy of visual speech perception between ages 7 and 13 after which the accuracy rate either stagnates or drops; and (2) a U-shaped development pattern in speed of perception with peak performance in 13-year olds. Results also showed that across all age groups, the overall levels of accuracy rose, whereas the response times fell for simplex finals, complex finals and initials. These findings suggest that (1) visual speech perception in Chinese is a developmental process that is acquired over time and is still fine-tuned well into late adolescence; (2) factors other than cross-linguistic differences in phonological complexity and degrees of reliance on visual information are involved in development of visual speech perception.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the children and their families in the conduct of this research.
Declaration of interest
The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
Funding
This work was supported partially by the University of Georgia COE Faculty Summer Research Grant to the first author (grant number 13YJA740023) from the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China and from Hubei Provincial Department of Education to the second author (grant number 14ZD005), as well as from the China National Social Science Foundation (grant number 15BYY069).