Exploring early developmental changes in face scanning patterns during the perception of audiovisual mismatch of speech cues

Abstract

Young infants are capable of integrating auditory and visual information and their speech perception can be influenced by visual cues, while 5-month-olds detect mismatch between mouth articulations and speech sounds. From 6 months of age, infants gradually shift their attention away from eyes and towards the mouth in articulating faces, potentially to benefit from intersensory redundancy of audiovisual (AV) cues. Using eye tracking, we investigated whether 6- to 9-month-olds showed a similar age-related increase of looking to the mouth, while observing congruent and/or redundant versus mismatched and non-redundant speech cues. Participants distinguished between congruent and incongruent AV cues as reflected by the amount of looking to the mouth. They showed an age-related increase in attention to the mouth, but only for non-redundant, mismatched AV speech cues. Our results highlight the role of intersensory redundancy and audiovisual mismatch mechanisms in facilitating the development of speech processing in infants under 12 months of age.

Keywords:

• Infancy
• Eye tracking
• Face scanning
• Audiovisual (AV) speech integration
• Audiovisual mismatch

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Przemyslaw Tomalski

We acknowledge the financial support of Eranda Foundation and the University of East London.

Helena Ribeiro

We would like to thank all participating infants and parents for their contribution, Robin Panneton and Mark H. Johnson for helpful comments and Glorianne Spiteri and Caroline Frostick for assistance with data collection.