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Selective attention to a talker's mouth in infancy: role of audiovisual temporal synchrony and linguistic experience
Author(s) -
Hillairet de Boisferon Anne,
Tift Amy H.,
Minar Nicholas J.,
Lewkowicz David J.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12381
Subject(s) - psychology , cognitive psychology , linguistics , visual attention , communication , perception , neuroscience , philosophy
Previous studies have found that infants shift their attention from the eyes to the mouth of a talker when they enter the canonical babbling phase after 6 months of age. Here, we investigated whether this increased attentional focus on the mouth is mediated by audio‐visual synchrony and linguistic experience. To do so, we tracked eye gaze in 4‐, 6‐, 8‐, 10‐, and 12‐month‐old infants while they were exposed either to desynchronized native or desynchronized non‐native audiovisual fluent speech. Results indicated that, regardless of language, desynchronization disrupted the usual pattern of relative attention to the eyes and mouth found in response to synchronized speech at 10 months but not at any other age. These findings show that audio‐visual synchrony mediates selective attention to a talker's mouth just prior to the emergence of initial language expertise and that it declines in importance once infants become native‐language experts.