Children's perception of visual and auditory speech.

Preschool children's evaluation and integration of visual and auditory information in speech perception was compared with that of adults. Subjects identified speech events, which consisted of synthetic speech syllables ranging from /ba/ to /da/ combined with a videotaped /ba/, /da/, or no articulation. Both variables influenced the identification judgments for both groups of subjects. The results were used to test current views of the development of perceptual categorization and speech perception. Tests of quantitative models indicated that both preschool children and adults had available continuous and independent sources of information. The results were well described by a fuzzy logical model of perception, which assumes that the perceiver integrates continuous and independent sources of information and determines the relative goodness of match to prototype definitions in memory. The only developmental difference was less of an influence of the visual source of information for children relative to adults. 1 explanation is that the children simply attended less to the visual source. A second experiment eliminated the attentional explanation by showing identical results when the children were also required to indicate whether or not the speaker's mouth was moving.