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Updated: Aug 26, 2025
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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
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Seeing a talking face matters: Infants' segmentation of continuous auditory-visual speech
Sok Hui Jessica Tan1,2, Marina Kalashnikova1,3,4, Denis Burnham1
1The MARCS Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Milpera, New South Wales, Australia.
Summary
Seven-month-old infants learning English showed improved speech segmentation with auditory-visual (AV) speech compared to auditory-only (AO) speech. Visual speech cues enhance early language acquisition by aiding word segmentation.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Linguistics
Background:
- Speech segmentation is crucial for language acquisition in infants.
- While visual speech aids adults, its effect on infant speech segmentation is understudied.
- Understanding visual speech influence on infants informs early language development theories.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if visual speech facilitates speech segmentation in 7-month-old infants.
- To examine the relationship between infants' attention to facial cues and segmentation abilities.
- To explore how auditory-visual speech impacts word segmentation compared to auditory-only speech.
Main Methods:
- Two groups of 7-month-old infants (English-learning) were exposed to continuous speech.
- One group received auditory-only (AO) speech, the other auditory-visual (AV) speech.
- Infants' attention to mouth vs. eyes and segmentation performance were measured.
Main Results:
- Both AO and AV groups successfully segmented words.
- Speech segmentation performance was sustained longer in the AV group.
- AV infants showed greater attention to the speaker's mouth, particularly early in trials.
Conclusions:
- Visual speech cues facilitate speech segmentation in infants.
- Enhanced attention to the mouth may be a pathway through which visual speech aids perception.
- Findings suggest visual speech plays a role in early language acquisition and speech perception development.
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