The bimodal perception of speech in infancy.

Infants 18 to 20 weeks old recognize the correspondence between auditorially and visually presented speech sounds, and the spectral information contained in the sounds is critical to the detection of these correspondences. Some infants imitated the sounds presented during the experiment. Both the ability to detect auditory-visual correspondences and the tendency to imitate may reflect the infant's knowledge of the relationship between audition and articulation.