Perception of Multisensory Gender Coherence in 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants

Abstract

One of the most salient social categories conveyed by human faces and voices is gender. We investigated the developmental emergence of the ability to perceive the coherence of auditory and visual attributes of gender in 6- and 9-month-old infants. Infants viewed two side-by-side video clips of a man and a woman singing a nursery rhyme and heard a synchronous male or female soundtrack. Results showed that 6-month-old infants did not match the audible and visible attributes of gender, and 9-month-old infants matched only female faces and voices. These findings indicate that the ability to perceive the multisensory coherence of gender emerges relatively late in infancy and that it reflects the greater experience that most infants have with female faces and voices.

Multisensory Processes: A Balancing Act across the Lifespan

“…By five months, infants become susceptible to the multisensory speech illusion known as the McGurk effect [37], which indexes the binding of auditory and visual speech elements. By 6–9 months of age infants begin to detect gender [38] and affect [39] as bound multisensory perceptual constructs, by 8 months they start to selectively attend to the source of fluent audiovisual speech located in a talker’s mouth [2], and by 12 months they begin to perceive the multisensory coherence of fluent audiovisual speech and the multisensory identity of their native speech [40,41] (Figure 2B). This general developmental picture is the same for pairings beyond vision and audition (e.g.…”

Audio-Visual Perception of Gender by Infants Emerges Earlier for Adult-Directed Speech

“…Adults perceive faces and voices as coherent entities (e.g., [14, 15]) and face-voice associations can be the basis for gender identification, e.g., long hair and thin and softly curved eyebrows associated with high-pitched voice [16]. Although infants perceive audiovisual coherence of speech syllables as early as 2 to 4 months of age [17–19], their ability to use audio-visual correspondences to respond to gender emerges in the second half of the first year of life, and consistent with the work on visual categories, is restricted to female faces [20, 21]. For example, the work of Walker-Andrews et al [22] has revealed that 6 month-old infants were able to reliably match synchronous faces and voices when presented with gender information.…”

“…Some studies investigating perception of multisensory gender coherence have presented dynamic faces [19, 20, 22], whereas others have relied on static images [21]. Use of dynamic faces provides a more ecologically valid approach to investigate multisensory perception of gender, as our natural environment is surrounded with dynamic multisensory cues [25].…”

“…Using dynamic stimuli and exaggerated prosodic nursery rhymes characteristic of IDS, Hillairet de Boisferon et al [20] recently investigated the developmental emergence of the ability to perceive the coherence of auditory and visual attributes of gender in 6- and 9-month-old infants. Infants viewed two side-by-side video clips of a man and a woman reciting a nursery rhyme and heard a synchronous male or female soundtrack.…”

“…Because Hillairet de Boisferon et al [20] only investigated IDS and not ADS, we conducted a new study to clarify whether and how the manner of speech may influence the perception of multisensory gender coherence. The experiment consisted of four 12-s trials, during which infants saw two side-by-side silent video-clips of actors (a male and a female) reciting a nursery rhyme; they were the same video-clips used by Hillairet de Boisferon et al [20].…”