Visual speech contributes to phonetic learning in 6-month-old infants. Teinonen, T., Aslin, R. N, Alku, P., & Csibra, G. Cognition, 108(3):850–5, September, 2008.
Visual speech contributes to phonetic learning in 6-month-old infants. [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
Previous research has shown that infants match vowel sounds to facial displays of vowel articulation [Kuhl, P. K., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy. Science, 218, 1138-1141; Patterson, M. L., & Werker, J. F. (1999). Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants. Infant Behaviour & Development, 22, 237-247], and integrate seen and heard speech sounds [Rosenblum, L. D., Schmuckler, M. A., & Johnson, J. A. (1997). The McGurk effect in infants. Perception & Psychophysics, 59, 347-357; Burnham, D., & Dodd, B. (2004). Auditory-visual speech integration by prelinguistic infants: Perception of an emergent consonant in the McGurk effect. Developmental Psychobiology, 45, 204-220]. However, the role of visual speech in language development remains unknown. Our aim was to determine whether seen articulations enhance phoneme discrimination, thereby playing a role in phonetic category learning. We exposed 6-month-old infants to speech sounds from a restricted range of a continuum between /ba/ and /da/, following a unimodal frequency distribution. Synchronously with these speech sounds, one group of infants (the two-category group) saw a visual articulation of a canonical /ba/ or /da/, with the two alternative visual articulations, /ba/ and /da/, being presented according to whether the auditory token was on the /ba/ or /da/ side of the midpoint of the continuum. Infants in a second (one-category) group were presented with the same unimodal distribution of speech sounds, but every token for any particular infant was always paired with the same syllable, either a visual /ba/ or a visual /da/. A stimulus-alternation preference procedure following the exposure revealed that infants in the former, and not in the latter, group discriminated the /ba/-/da/ contrast. These results not only show that visual information about speech articulation enhances phoneme discrimination, but also that it may contribute to the learning of phoneme boundaries in infancy.
@article{Teinonen2008a,
	title = {Visual speech contributes to phonetic learning in 6-month-old infants.},
	volume = {108},
	issn = {0010-0277},
	url = {http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18590910},
	doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2008.05.009},
	abstract = {Previous research has shown that infants match vowel sounds to facial displays of vowel articulation [Kuhl, P. K., \& Meltzoff, A. N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy. Science, 218, 1138-1141; Patterson, M. L., \& Werker, J. F. (1999). Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants. Infant Behaviour \& Development, 22, 237-247], and integrate seen and heard speech sounds [Rosenblum, L. D., Schmuckler, M. A., \& Johnson, J. A. (1997). The McGurk effect in infants. Perception \& Psychophysics, 59, 347-357; Burnham, D., \& Dodd, B. (2004). Auditory-visual speech integration by prelinguistic infants: Perception of an emergent consonant in the McGurk effect. Developmental Psychobiology, 45, 204-220]. However, the role of visual speech in language development remains unknown. Our aim was to determine whether seen articulations enhance phoneme discrimination, thereby playing a role in phonetic category learning. We exposed 6-month-old infants to speech sounds from a restricted range of a continuum between /ba/ and /da/, following a unimodal frequency distribution. Synchronously with these speech sounds, one group of infants (the two-category group) saw a visual articulation of a canonical /ba/ or /da/, with the two alternative visual articulations, /ba/ and /da/, being presented according to whether the auditory token was on the /ba/ or /da/ side of the midpoint of the continuum. Infants in a second (one-category) group were presented with the same unimodal distribution of speech sounds, but every token for any particular infant was always paired with the same syllable, either a visual /ba/ or a visual /da/. A stimulus-alternation preference procedure following the exposure revealed that infants in the former, and not in the latter, group discriminated the /ba/-/da/ contrast. These results not only show that visual information about speech articulation enhances phoneme discrimination, but also that it may contribute to the learning of phoneme boundaries in infancy.},
	number = {3},
	urldate = {2013-08-23},
	journal = {Cognition},
	author = {Teinonen, Tuomas and Aslin, Richard N and Alku, Paavo and Csibra, Gergely},
	month = sep,
	year = {2008},
	pmid = {18590910},
	keywords = {\#nosource, Attention, Cues, Female, Humans, Infant, Language Development, Lipreading, Male, Phonetics, SNC 2009, Speech Perception, cognitiva, humanos},
	pages = {850--5},
}

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