Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:47:45.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Perception of audio-visual speech synchrony in Spanish-speaking children with and without specific language impairment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2012

FERRAN PONS ,
LLORENÇ ANDREU ,
MONICA SANZ-TORRENT ,
LUCÍA BUIL-LEGAZ  and
DAVID J. LEWKOWICZ
FERRAN PONS*
Affiliation:
Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona and Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (IR3C), Barcelona, Spain
LLORENÇ ANDREU
Affiliation:
Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona and Cognitive Neuroscience and Information Technologies Research Program, IN3, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
MONICA SANZ-TORRENT
Affiliation:
Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona
LUCÍA BUIL-LEGAZ
Affiliation:
Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona
DAVID J. LEWKOWICZ
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Center for Complex Systems & Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University
*
Address for correspondence: Ferran Pons, Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Pg. de la Vall d'Hebrón, 171, 08035 – Barcelona, Spain. tel: +34 933125144; fax: +34934021363; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Speech perception involves the integration of auditory and visual articulatory information, and thus requires the perception of temporal synchrony between this information. There is evidence that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty with auditory speech perception but it is not known if this is also true for the integration of auditory and visual speech. Twenty Spanish-speaking children with SLI, twenty typically developing age-matched Spanish-speaking children, and twenty Spanish-speaking children matched for MLU-w participated in an eye-tracking study to investigate the perception of audiovisual speech synchrony. Results revealed that children with typical language development perceived an audiovisual asynchrony of 666 ms regardless of whether the auditory or visual speech attribute led the other one. Children with SLI only detected the 666 ms asynchrony when the auditory component followed the visual component. None of the groups perceived an audiovisual asynchrony of 366 ms. These results suggest that the difficulty of speech processing by children with SLI would also involve difficulties in integrating auditory and visual aspects of speech perception.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 687 - 700
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (SEJ2007-62743 to M. S., and PSI2010-20294 to F. P.) and by the National Science Foundation (grants BCS-0751888 to D. J. L.). Special thanks to all the children who participated and to CEIP Els Pins (Barcelona), CREDA Narcís Massó (Girona), and the School of Educational Psychology Services – SPE (Castelló).

References

REFERENCES

Alsius, A., Navarra, J., Campbell, R. & Soto-Faraco, S. (2005). AV integration of speech falters under high attention demands. Current Biology 15, 839–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bebko, J. M., Weiss, J. A., Denmark, J. L. & Gómez, P. (2006). Discrimination of temporal synchrony in intermodal events by children with autism and children with developmental disabilities without autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 47(1), 88–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boliek, C., Keintz, C. K., Norrix, L. W. & Obrzut, J. (2010). Auditory-visual perception of speech in children with learning disabilities: The McGurk effect. Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology 34(6), 124–31.Google Scholar
Chandrasekaran, C., Trubanova, A., Stillittano, S., Caplier, A. & Ghazanfar, A. A. (2009). The natural statistics of audiovisual speech. PLoS Computational Biology 5, e1000436.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Desjardins, R., Rogers, J. & Werker, J. F. (1997). An exploration of why preschoolers perform differently than do adults in AV perception tasks. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 66, 85–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, N. F. & Spitz, L. T. (1980). The detection of auditory visual desynchrony. Perception 9, 719–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dodd, B., McIntosh, B., Erdener, D. & Burnham, D. (2008). Perception of the auditory-visual illusion in speech perception by children with phonological disorders. Clinical Phonetics & Linguistics 22, 69–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunn, L. M., Dunn, L. M. & Arribas, D. (2006). PPVT-III. Peabody. Test de vocabulario en imágenes. Madrid: TEA Ediciones.Google Scholar
Elliott, L. L. & Hammer, M. A. (1988). Longitudinal changes in auditory discrimination in normal children and children with language-learning problems. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 53, 467–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaufman, A. S. & Kaufman, N. L. (2004). KBIT: Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (KBIT, Spanish version). Madrid: TEA Editions.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. (1998). Specific Language Impairment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Lewkowicz, D. J. (1996). Perception of auditory-visual temporal synchrony in human infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 22(5), 1094–1106.Google ScholarPubMed
Lewkowicz, D. J. (2000). The development of intersensory temporal perception: An epigenetic systems/limitations view. Psychological Bulletin 126(2), 281–308.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewkowicz, D. J. (2010). Infant perception of audio-visual speech synchrony. Developmental Psychology 46(1), 66–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewkowicz, D. J. & Hansen-Tift, A. M. (2012). Infants deploy selective attention to the mouth of a talking face when learning speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(5), 1431–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGurk, H. & MacDonald, J. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature 264, 746–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Munhall, K., Gribble, P., Sacco, L. & Ward, M. (1996). Temporal constraints on the McGurk effect. Perception and Psychophysics 58, 351–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Munhall, K. G. & Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. (2004). Spatial and temporal constraints on audiovisual speech perception. In Calvert, G. A., Spence, C. & Stein, B. E. (eds), The handbook of multisensory processes, 177–88. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norrix, L. W., Plante, E., Vance, R. & Boliek, C. A. (2007). Auditory-visual integration for speech by children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 50, 1639–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noterdaeme, M., Amorosa, H., Mildenberger, K., Sitter, S. & Minow, F. (2001). Evaluation of attention problems in children with autism and in children with specific language disorder. European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 10, 58–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pérez, E. & Serra, M. (1998). Análisis del retraso del lenguaje (AREL). Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
Saborit, C. & Julián, J. P. (2003). ELI – La evaluación del lenguaje infantil. Castelló de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I.Google Scholar
Siva, N., Stevens, E., Kuhl, P. & Meltzoff, A. (1995). A comparison between cerebral-palsied and normal adults in the perception of auditory-visual illusions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 98, 2983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, R. & Heinz, J. M. (1996). Vowel perception in children with and without language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 39, 860–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stark, R. E. & Tallal, P. (1981). Selection of children with specific language deficits. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 46, 114–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sumby, W. H. & Pollack, I. (1954). Visual contribution to speech intelligibility in noise. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 26, 212–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Summerfield, A. Q. (1979). The use of visual information in phonetic perception. Phonetica 36, 314–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tallal, P. (1984). Temporal or phonetic processing deficit in dyslexia? That is the question. Applied Psycholinguistics 5, 167–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tallal, P. & Piercy, M. (1973). Developmental aphasia: Impaired rate of non-verbal processing as a function of sensory modality. Neuropsychologia 11, 389–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tallal, P. & Piercy, M. (1975). Developmental aphasia: The perception of brief vowels and extended stop consonants. Neuropsychologia 13, 69–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tallal, P., Stark, R. & Mellits, E. (1985). Identification of language-impaired children on the basis of rapid perception and production skills. Brain and Language 25, 314–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van Wassenhove, V., Grant, K. W. & Poeppel, D. (2007). Temporal window of integration in auditory-visual speech perception. Neuropsychologia 45(3), 598–607.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vatakis, A. & Spence, C. (2007). Crossmodal binding: Evaluating the ‘unity assumption’ using audiovisual speech stimuli. Perception & Psychophysics 69, 744–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wechsler, D., Cordero, A. & de la Cruz, M. V. (1993). WISC-R: escala de inteligencia de Wechsler para niños – revisada: manual. Madrid: TEA Ediciones.Google Scholar
Welch, R. B. & Warren, D. H. (1980). Immediate perceptual response to intersensory discrepancy. Psychological Bulletin 88, 638–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wright, B. A., Lombardino, L. J., King, W. M., Puranik, C. S., Leonard, C. M. & Merzenich, M. M. (1997). Deficits in auditory temporal and spectral resolution in language-impaired children. Nature 387, 176–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yehia, H., Rubin, P. & Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. (1998). Quantitative association of vocal-tract and facial behavior. Speech Communication 26(1/2), 23–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar