Presentation
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The development of audiovisual speech binding in 6- to 10-year-old children and the role of selective attention
Poster D90 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Mathilde Fort1,2, Alexandre Duroyal3, Eddy Cavalli4, Stéphanie Massol4, Chotiga Pattamadilok3; 1Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, UMR 5105, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France, 2Centre de Recherche en NeuroSciences de Lyon, UMR 5292, Université Lyon 1, Lyon, France, 3Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL), CNRS (UMR 7309), Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence, France, 4Laboratoire d’Etude Des Mécanismes Cognitifs (EA3082), Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France
In natural communication, we not only hear our social partners but also see their articulatory gestures from their talking faces (visual speech). Adults are known to benefit from this multimodality to enhance speech perception, notably in adverse situations (e.g., noisy environment, non-native languages). While children strongly rely on these audiovisual (AV) speech cues during the acquisition of their native language, the benefit of AV speech remains smaller than in adults. One mandatory step to benefit from this multimodality is AV binding. Children must select and match precise visuo-spatial configurations of lip movements with speech sounds. This matching process takes place in narrow temporal windows, since in running speech, these configurations quickly change over time. Binding speech sounds and articulatory gestures into a coherent percept relies on a combination of top-down knowledge of spatial configurations of speech articulators associated with speech sounds and temporal synchrony processing skills. In children, AV binding improves until teenagerhood, which could be due a maturation of one or both aforementioned subskills and probably their interaction with attention. The goal of this study was to examine the role of these factors in the developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech binding in 6- to 10-year-old children (N total = 131: N 6-7 yo: 50; N 7-8 yo: 40; N 8-9 yo: 37). To this aim, we examined the spatial and temporal components of the AV binding process by using an audio-only vs. AV word identification in noise (AV-noise) and AV temporal synchrony judgement (AV-synch). The additional role of selective attention on these components was evaluated by using a standardized selective attention subset of the WISC V. In the AV-noise task, we compared children’s word identification performances when words were uttered against background noise in either audio-only or AV speech context. We found that the AV gain score (derived from the comparison of the performance obtained in the two speech contexts) was sensitive to the interaction between age and selective attention [F(2,131)= 3.69, p = 0.03], which indicates that the level of AV gain increases with the level of selective attention only in the oldest group [8-9 yo: F(1,37) = 4.94, p = 0.03] (Figure Xa). In the AV-synch task (Figure Xb), we compared children’s asynchrony judgement of lips movements and speech sounds at five levels of temporal delay (SOA): 0; 165; 333; 500; 666 ms (speech sounds always preceded lips movements in the asynchrony conditions). Asynchrony judgement performances improved with age and SOA [X²(6) = 15.9, p = .014], but it was not affected by selective attention. Interestingly, performances on both AV tasks were positively correlated (Figure Xc), suggesting that both components of AV binding process may also share a common mechanism (p = .008). These results on a large pool of young children provided a mechanistic account of the developmental trajectory of audiovisual binding, and the respective roles of age and attention in this central process of speech processing.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration