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Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants

University of British Columbia

Past research (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982; 1984) claims that 4.5-month-old infants can match phonetic information in the lips and voice. These studies used female faces poking through cloth to occlude possible distractions. Attempts to replicate these findings have not produced convincing results. The present studies were conducted to replicate and extend past research by examining how robust the ability to match phonetic information in lips and voice is at 4.5-months of age. If speech is represented intermodally in young infants then they should show evidence of matching with more ecologically valid visual stimuli and also with male faces and voices. Also, more infants might be expected to imitate the vowels when the model's lips and voice match than when they do not match. Sixty-four infants were seated in front of two side-by-side video monitors displaying filmed images of a female or a male face, each articulating a different vowel sound (/i/ or /a/) in synchrony. The sound track was played through a central speaker and corresponded to one of the two vowels but was synchronous with both. Infants spent approximately equal amounts of time looking and smiling at both the female and the male faces (p>.05). However, infants looked longer at the face that matched the heard vowel for both female and male stimuli (p<.01). Also, infants showed articulatory imitation in response to the matching face/voice stimuli (p<.05). The finding that bimodal phonetic matching holds with a more ecologically valid face and with male stimuli supports the hypothesis that infants are able to link phonetic information presented in the lips and voice. This suggests an integrated, multi-modal representation of articulatory and acoustic phonetic information at 4.5-months of age.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-05-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8206

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace