Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Psych J. 2022 Jun;11(3):409-418. doi: 10.1002/pchj.538. Epub 2022 Mar 29.
During childhood, the ability to detect audiovisual synchrony gradually sharpens for simple stimuli such as flashbeeps and single syllables. However, little is known about how children perceive synchrony for natural and continuous speech. This study investigated young children's gaze patterns while they were watching movies of two identical speakers telling stories side by side. Only one speaker's lip movements matched the voices and the other one either led or lagged behind the soundtrack by 600 ms. Children aged 3-6 years (n = 94, 52.13% males) showed an overall preference for the synchronous speaker, with no age-related changes in synchrony-detection sensitivity as indicated by similar gaze patterns across ages. However, viewing time to the synchronous speech was significantly longer in the auditory-leading (AL) condition compared with that in the visual-leading (VL) condition, suggesting asymmetric sensitivities for AL versus VL asynchrony have already been established in early childhood. When further examining gaze patterns on dynamic faces, we found that more attention focused on the mouth region was an adaptive strategy to read visual speech signals and thus associated with increased viewing time of the synchronous videos. Attention to detail, one dimension of autistic traits featured by local processing, has been found to be correlated with worse performances in speech synchrony processing. These findings extended previous research by showing the development of speech synchrony perception in young children, and may have implications for clinical populations (e.g., autism) with impaired multisensory integration.
在儿童时期，对于简单的刺激，如闪光灯和单音节，检测视听同步的能力逐渐增强。然而，对于儿童如何感知自然和连续语音的同步性，人们知之甚少。本研究通过观察两个相同的说话者并排讲故事的电影，研究了幼儿的注视模式。只有一个说话者的口型与声音相匹配，而另一个说话者的口型要么比音轨提前 600 毫秒，要么滞后。3-6 岁的儿童（n=94，52.13%为男性）总体上更喜欢同步说话者，各年龄段的注视模式相似，表明同步检测灵敏度没有年龄相关的变化。然而，在听觉领先（AL）条件下观看同步语音的时间明显长于在视觉领先（VL）条件下观看同步语音的时间，这表明在幼儿期已经建立了对 AL 与 VL 异步的不对称敏感性。当进一步检查动态面部的注视模式时，我们发现，更多地关注嘴部区域是一种阅读视觉语音信号的自适应策略，因此与观看同步视频的时间增加有关。自闭症特征之一的细节关注，即局部处理，已被发现与语音同步处理的表现较差相关。这些发现通过展示幼儿言语同步感知的发展，扩展了先前的研究，可能对存在多感官整合障碍的临床人群（如自闭症）具有重要意义。
