The interaction of visual exploration and auditory processing is central to early cognitive development, supporting object discrimination, categorization, and word learning. Research has shown visual-auditory interactions to be complex, created from multiple processes and changing over multiple timescales. To better understand these interactions,…

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18-month-old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word-object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in…

Infants must learn about many cognitive domains (e.g., language, music) from auditory statistics, yet capacity limits on their cognitive resources restrict the quantity that they can encode. Previous research has established that infants can attend to only a subset of available acoustic input. Yet few previous studies have directly examined infant…

Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non-native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen-, 17-, and 19-month-olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels…

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

Vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias. The perception of the /i/-/e/ contrast was explored in 144…

From birth, infants detect associations between the locations of static visual objects and sounds they emit, but there is limited evidence regarding their sensitivity to the dynamic equivalent when a sound-emitting object moves. In 4 experiments involving thirty-six 2-month-olds, forty-eight 5-month-olds, and forty-eight 8-month-olds, we…

Past research has uncovered a surprising paradox: Although 14-month-olds have exquisite phonetic discrimination skills (e.g., distinguishing [b] from [d]), they have difficulty using phonetic detail when mapping "novel" words to objects in laboratory tasks (confusing "bin" and "din"). While some have attributed infants' difficulty to immature word…

This study investigated perception of audiovisual sequences in 3- and 4-month-old infants. Infants were habituated to sequences consisting of moving/sounding or looming/sounding objects and then tested for their ability to detect changes in the order of the objects, sounds, or both. Results showed that 3-month-olds perceived the order of 3-element…

Two experiments investigated infants' perception of silence in the speech contrast between the words "slit" and "split." Experiment I was designed to determine whether infants could discriminate a speech contrast cued primarily by silence duration. Experiment II studied whether infants can discriminate brief durations of…

In these two studies, neonatal oculomotor behavior was observed under various conditions of visual and auditory stimulation. Findings showed auditory and visual perception to be relatively independent during the neonatal period. (Author/JMB)

Infants were tested for their discrimination of changes in the melodic contour (direction of successive pitch changes) of brief melodies in the context of discernible variations in key or interval size. (PCB)

Findings demonstrate a finer partitioning of auditory space near midline than in hemifields. Discusses implications for an understanding of the development of auditory processing mechanisms in sound localizations. (RH)

The role of memory factors in the vowel discrimination of normal and at-risk 8-week-old infants was examined by studying the categorical versus continuous discrimination of very brief vowels in a nonnutritive sucking paradigm. Discrimination of the silent delay interval between the last familiar and the first novel stimulus was also examined.…