Amodal representation of speech in infants

Walton, Gail E.; Bower, T. G. R.

doi:10.1016/0163-6383(93)80019-5

Cited by 51 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The results showed that the infants chose to look longer at the face that matched the sound track they heard (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982. Replications and extensions of this work have confirmed and enriched these conclusions (MacKain, Studdert-Kennedy, Spieker, & Stern, 1983;Walton & Bower, 1993). These experiments not only demonstrate intermodal coordination between audition and vision, but also show that young infants prefer to look at the person who is talking to them.…”

Section: Intermodal Mapping: Oral-visual and Speech Perception-producsupporting

confidence: 67%

Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication

Meltzoff

1999

Journal of Communication Disorders

169

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There has been a revolution in our understanding of infant and toddler cognition that promises to have far-reaching implications for our understanding of communicative and linguistic development. Four empirical findings that helped to prompt this change in theory are analyzed: (a) Intermodal coordination-newborns operate with multimodal information, recognizing equivalences in information across sensory-modalities; (b) Imitation-newborns imitate the lip and tongue movements they see others perform; (c) Memory-young infants form long-lasting representations of perceived events and use these memories to generate motor productions after lengthy delays in novel contexts; (d) Theory of mind-by 18 months of age toddlers have adopted a theory of mind, reading below surface behavior to the goals and intentions in people's actions. This paper examines three views currently being offered in the literature to replace the classical framework of early cognitive development: modularity-nativism, connectionism, and theorytheory. Arguments are marshaled to support the "theory-theory" view. This view emphasizes a combination of innate structure and qualitative reorganization in children's thought based on input from the people and things in their culture. It is suggested that preverbal cognition forms a substrate for language acquisition and that analyzing cognition may enhance our understanding of certain disorders of communication. KeywordsIntermodal coordination; Imitation; Memory; Theory of mind; Representation; Language acquisition; Face perception There has been a profound, even revolutionary, shift in our theory of developmental psychology. The revolution began with challenges to Piaget's theory of cognitive development, particularly his views of infancy. As everybody who has attended scientific conferences, read technical journals, or monitored the popular media knows, modern research has discovered that young children know more at earlier ages than had been predicted by classical theory. These new findings led to the gradual weakening, and finally the collapse of, classical Piagetian theory (Piaget, 1952(Piaget, , 1954(Piaget, , 1962.There is now a furious search for a new framework. An analogy can be drawn to the early part of this century when classical Newtonian mechanics was overthrown and physicists NIH Public Access

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Section: Intermodal Mapping: Oral-visual and Speech Perception-producsupporting

confidence: 67%

Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication

Meltzoff

1999

Journal of Communication Disorders

169

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“…As a result, we predicted that young infants would match monkey faces and voices, but that older infants would not. This finding would differ markedly from previous findings showing that infants can match human faces and voices as early as 2 months of age and as late as 12 months of age (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8).…”

contrasting

confidence: 56%

“…However, given the nature of the methodology, this was impractical: infants typically do not tolerate more than the four test trials in a testing session. Also, a large body of evidence shows clearly that human infants as young as 2 months of age and as old as 12 months of age can make intraspecies (human face-voice) intersensory matches in the same kind of task used here (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). Thus, it is unlikely that the subjects used in the current study would be exceptional in this capacity.…”

mentioning

confidence: 84%

“…In order for them to have veridical and meaningful social experiences with such people, infants must be able to integrate particular faces and voices by detecting their correspondences. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that, beginning as early as 2 months of age, infants begin to exhibit the ability to perceive face-voice correspondences (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). Despite this fact, however, the developmental process underlying intersensory integration of faces and voices, as well as more general intersensory processes, remain poorly understood.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Lewkowicz

Ghazanfar

2006

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

140

175

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Between 6 and 10 months of age, infants become better at discriminating among native voices and human faces and worse at discriminating among nonnative voices and other species' faces. We tested whether these unisensory perceptual narrowing effects reflect a general ontogenetic feature of perceptual systems by testing across sensory modalities. We showed pairs of monkey faces producing two different vocalizations to 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old infants and asked whether they would prefer to look at the corresponding face when they heard one of the two vocalizations. Only the two youngest groups exhibited intersensory matching, indicating that perceptual narrowing is pan-sensory and a fundamental feature of perceptual development.crossmodal ͉ face processing ͉ multisensory F rom the moment of birth, infants find themselves in a socially rich environment where they see and hear other people. In order for them to have veridical and meaningful social experiences with such people, infants must be able to integrate particular faces and voices by detecting their correspondences. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that, beginning as early as 2 months of age, infants begin to exhibit the ability to perceive face-voice correspondences (1-8). Despite this fact, however, the developmental process underlying intersensory integration of faces and voices, as well as more general intersensory processes, remain poorly understood. Current theoretical views assume either that basic intersensory perceptual abilities are present at birth and become increasingly differentiated and refined over age (9) or that such abilities are not present at birth and only emerge gradually during the first years of life as a result of the child's active exploration of the world (10, 11).Most empirical evidence supports the former, differentiation, view in showing that basic intersensory perceptual abilities are already present in infancy and that as infants grow these abilities change and improve in significant ways (12, 13). For example, young human infants can perceive lower-order intersensory relations based on such attributes as intensity (14), temporal synchrony (15, 16), and duration (17), but do not integrate auditory and visual spatial cues (18). In contrast, older infants can perceive higher-order intersensory relations based on such attributes as affect (6) and gender (3), become capable of learning arbitrary intersensory associations (19) and can integrate auditory and visual spatial cues (18). Findings from studies of underlying neural mechanisms of intersensory integration in cats and rhesus monkeys show a similar pattern. Whereas multisensory cells in the superior colliculus of adult cats and rhesus monkeys integrate auditory and visual cues in spatial localization tasks, these cells do not integrate them in neonatal cats and monkeys (20,21). Together, extant findings suggest a general developmental pattern consisting of the initial emergence of low-level intersensory abilities, a subsequent agedependent refinement and improvement ...

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“…Infants of 2½ to 5 months fixate a human talker producing running speech longer when lip movements and voice are matched than when they are mismatched (Burnham & Dodd, 1998;Dodd, 1979), 6-month-olds match auditory presentations with the appropriate lip movements for particular syllables (MacKain, Studdert-Kennedy, Spieker, & Stern, 1983), and 4-month-old infants do so for particular native vowels (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982 and possibly also for a nonnative vowel (Walton & Bower, 1993). Recently, such auditory-visual vowel matching ability has been found for 2-month-old infants (Patterson & Werker, 2003), and there also is some evidence for auditory-visual matching in newborns (Aldridge, Braga, Walton, & Bower, 1999).…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Auditory–visual speech integration by prelinguistic infants: Perception of an emergent consonant in the McGurk effect

Burnham

Dodd

2004

Developmental Psychobiology

185

153

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The McGurk effect, in which auditory [ba] dubbed onto [ga] lip movements is perceived as "da" or "tha," was employed in a real-time task to investigate auditory-visual speech perception in prelingual infants. Experiments 1A and 1B established the validity of real-time dubbing for producing the effect. In Experiment 2, 4 1/2-month-olds were tested in a habituation-test paradigm, in which an auditory-visual stimulus was presented contingent upon visual fixation of a live face. The experimental group was habituated to a McGurk stimulus (auditory [ba] visual [ga]), and the control group to matching auditory-visual [ba]. Each group was then presented with three auditory-only test trials, [ba], [da], and [(delta)a] (as in then). Visual-fixation durations in test trials showed that the experimental group treated the emergent percept in the McGurk effect, [da] or [(delta)a], as familiar (even though they had not heard these sounds previously) and [ba] as novel. For control group infants [da] and [(delta)a] were no more familiar than [ba]. These results are consistent with infants' perception of the McGurk effect, and support the conclusion that prelinguistic infants integrate auditory and visual speech information.

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Amodal representation of speech in infants

Cited by 51 publications

References 7 publications

Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication

Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication

The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Auditory–visual speech integration by prelinguistic infants: Perception of an emergent consonant in the McGurk effect

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