Despite the body of research on auditory-visual speech perception in infants and schoolchildren, development in the early childhood period remains relatively uncharted. In this study, English-speaking children between three and four years of age were investigated for: (i) the development of visual speech perception--lip-reading and visual…

An example of the auditory-visual illusion in speech perception, first described by McGurk and MacDonald, is the perception of [ta] when listeners hear [pa] in synchrony with the lip movements for [ka]. One account of the illusion is that lip-read and heard speech are combined in an articulatory code since people who mispronounce words respond…

Three methods by which hearing adults process speechread information are discussed: selective adaptation, immediate memory, and repetition priming. Also discussed are mental representations of speech by hearing-impaired and hearing children, infants' responses to speechread stimuli compared to other stimuli, infants' speechreading of a foreign…