Experience-independent effects of matching and non-matching visual information on speech perception

Infants are sensitive to the correspondence between visual and auditory speech. Infants exhibit the McGurk effect, and matching audiovisual information may facilitate discrimination of similar consonant sounds in an infant’s native language (e.g., Teinonen et al., 2008). However, because most existing research in audiovisual speech perception has been conducted using native speech sounds with infants in their first year of life, little work has explored whether this link between the auditory and visual modalities of speech perception arises due to experience with the native language. In the present set of studies, English-learning six- and ten-month-old infants are tested for discrimination of a non-English speech contrast following familiarization with matching and mismatching audiovisual speech. Furthermore, the looking fixation behaviors of the two age groups are compared between the two conditions. Although it has been demonstrated that infants in the younger age range attend preferentially to the eye region when viewing matched audiovisual speech and that infants in the older age range temporarily attend to the mouth region (Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012), here deviations in this behavior for matching and mismatching non-native speech are examined (a link that has only been previously explored in the native language (Tomalski et al., 2013)).