Recognition of Amodal Language Identity Emerges in Infancy

By David J. Lewkowicz, Ferran Pons. 2013

34 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Audiovisual speech consists of overlapping and invariant patterns of dynamic acoustic and optic articulatory information. Research has shown that infants can perceive a variety of basic auditory-visual (A-V) relations but no studies have investigated whether and when infants begin to perceive higher order A-V relations inherent in speech. Here, we asked whether and when do infants become capable of recognizing amodal language identity, a critical perceptual skill that is necessary for the development of multisensory communication. Because, at a minimum, such a skill requires the ability to perceive suprasegmental auditory and visual linguistic information, we predicted that this skill would not emerge before higher-level speech processing and multisensory perceptual skills emerge. Consistent with this prediction, we found that recognition of the amodal identity of language emerges at 10–12 months of age but that when it emerges it is restricted to infants’ native language.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Multisensory Processes: A Balancing Act across the Lifespan (2016, background): “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 cohe”
Early Experience & Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing (2014, background): “Lewkowicz and Pons (2013) interpreted the preference for the novel visible utterance as indicating that older infants recognized the correspondence between the previously heard utterance in their native and, thus, familiar language and a face that could be seen speaking in the same language.”
Bilingualism Modulates Infants' Selective Attention to the Mouth of a Talking Face (2015, unknown): “Indeed, studies show that this general ability emerges in infancy (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982; Lewkowicz, 2010; Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2006; Lewkowicz & Pons, 2013; Patterson & Werker, 1999; Pons, Lewkowicz, Soto-Faraco, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2009; Rosenblum, Schmuckler, & Johnson, 1997; Teinonen, Aslin,…”