Auditory-Visual Speech Processing 2007 (AVSP2007) Kasteel Groenendaal, Hilvarenbeek, The Netherlands August 31 - September 3, 2007

Two-Month-Olds are Sensitive to Lip Rounding in Dynamic and Static Speech Events

Rebecca Baier (1), William J. Idsardi (1,2), Jeffrey Lidz (1,2)

(1) Department of Linguistics; (2) Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Our research replicates and extends previous work on infant audio-visual speech perception, demonstrating that two-month-old infants have knowledge of the audio-visual connection between the visual aspects of lip-posture and the pronunciation of vowels and glides. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm [6] the infants display a clear ability to distinguish /a/-/u/, /i/-/u/ and /i/-/wi/. The infants’ ability to discriminate /i/-/wi/ shows that even dynamic aspects of speech production within single syllables are salient to the infants.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Baier, Rebecca / Idsardi, William J. / Lidz, Jeffrey (2007): "Two-month-olds are sensitive to lip rounding in dynamic and static speech events", In AVSP-2007, paper L6-2.