Effects of Seeing and Hearing Vowels on Neonatal Facial Imitation

Abstract

For several decades, many authors have claimed the existence, early in life, of a tight link between perceptual and productive systems in speech. However, the question whether this link is acquired or is already present at birth remains open. This study aimed at investigating this question by employing the paradigm of neonatal facial imitation. We compared imitative responses of newborn infants presented either visual‐only, audiovisual congruent, or audiovisual incongruent models. Our results revealed that the newborns imitated significantly more quickly the movements of the model's mouth when this model was audiovisual congruent rather than visual‐only. Moreover, when observing an audiovisual incongruent model, the newborns did not produce imitative behavior. These findings, by highlighting the influence of speech perception on newborns' imitative responses, suggest that the neural architecture for perception–production is already in place at birth. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of a link between language and neonatal imitation, which could represent a precursor of more mature forms of vocal imitation and speech development in general.

Sensorimotor influences on speech perception in infancy

“…From these findings, Yeung and his colleagues have proposed that the information available in auditory and visual speech is mapped onto a common articulatory representation (48). This interpretation is also supported by vocal imitation studies in preverbal infants (8,(49)(50)(51), as in all of these studies the infants had access to both the auditory and visual information in speech. However, such findings (i) do not address, or consider, the extent to which sensorimotor information influences the perception of auditory speech directly, without visual support, and (ii) cannot rule out the possibility that experience with the native language has played a role in establishing specific sensorimotor influences on speech perception.…”

Vision of tongue movements bias auditory speech perception

“…This latter result shows that even if infants have not yet seen their tongue (or other facial gestures) they recognize the recruited effector as well as the associated action and correctly match it with an appropriate imitation. Therefore, developmental research suggests that experience-dependent associative mechanisms cannot account for multisensory association effects in general (Meltzoff & Borton, 1979;Meltzoff & Moore, 1977), and during audiovisual speech processing (Coulon, Hemimou, and Streri, 2013).…”

Demystifying infant vocal imitation: The roles of mouth looking and speaker’s gaze

“…For instance, Yeung and Werker (2013) found that 4.5-month-old infants looked longer at the speaker's lip movements which did not correspond to the shape of their own lips (e.g. It is important to acknowledge, however, that whilst production influences perception, the opposite can also occur: that is, audiovisual speech perception influences vocal production (Chen et al, 2004;Coulon et al, 2013;Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982, 1996Legerstee, 1990;Patterson & Werker, 1999). This indicates that a concurrent motor task can perturb an audiovisual matching task.…”