Speech perception and the sensorimotor system in Infancy Free

The speech that infants perceive and learn from is highly multisensory. Preverbal infants show multisensory speech sensitivities prior to direct associative experience, for instance, even to non-native speech that they have not experienced before. Sensorimotor influences on auditory perception are of increasing interest in the context of speech perception development. In a series of experiments, we explored whether infants’ speech perception is influenced by articulatory-auditory relations. Specifically, we experimentally restricted the movement of infants’ relevant articulators during speech perception tasks. We review a series of studies showing both behavioral (eye-tracking) and neural (EEG) evidence that preverbal infants’ auditory speech perception is influenced by articulatorily specific sensorimotor input at 6- and 3- months of age. To control for the possibility of learning, we tested both native and non-native (hence not visually nor auditorily familiar) phonetic contrasts. To explore whether the auditory-sensorimotor relation is in place even without feedback from self-produced vocalization, we tested consonant discrimination in infants as young as 3-month, who are not yet babbling and are unable to produce consonant sounds. Our results show that the sensorimotor-auditory link is in place prior to specific experience watching, hearing, or producing the relevant sounds.