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Nematova S, Zinszer B, Jasinska KK. Exploring audiovisual speech perception in monolingual and bilingual children in Uzbekistan. J Exp Child Psychol 2024; 239:105808. [PMID: 37972516 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105808] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/29/2023] [Revised: 10/05/2023] [Accepted: 10/23/2023] [Indexed: 11/19/2023]
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the development of audiovisual speech perception in monolingual Uzbek-speaking and bilingual Uzbek-Russian-speaking children, focusing on the impact of language experience on audiovisual speech perception and the role of visual phonetic (i.e., mouth movements corresponding to phonetic/lexical information) and temporal (i.e., timing of speech signals) cues. A total of 321 children aged 4 to 10 years in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, discriminated /ba/ and /da/ syllables across three conditions: auditory-only, audiovisual phonetic (i.e., sound accompanied by mouth movements), and audiovisual temporal (i.e., sound onset/offset accompanied by mouth opening/closing). Effects of modality (audiovisual phonetic, audiovisual temporal, or audio-only cues), age, group (monolingual or bilingual), and their interactions were tested using a Bayesian regression model. Overall, older participants performed better than younger participants. Participants performed better in the audiovisual phonetic modality compared with the auditory modality. However, no significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children was observed across all modalities. This finding stands in contrast to earlier studies. We attribute the contrasting findings of our study and the existing literature to the cross-linguistic similarity of the language pairs involved. When the languages spoken by bilinguals exhibit substantial linguistic similarity, there may be an increased necessity to disambiguate speech signals, leading to a greater reliance on audiovisual cues. The limited phonological similarity between Uzbek and Russian might have minimized bilinguals' need to rely on visual speech cues, contributing to the lack of group differences in our study.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shakhlo Nematova
- Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA.
| | - Benjamin Zinszer
- Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA
| | - Kaja K Jasinska
- Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A1, Canada
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Liu S, Li X, Sun R. The effect of masks on infants' ability to fast-map and generalize new words. JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE 2024:1-19. [PMID: 38189211 DOI: 10.1017/s0305000923000697] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/09/2024]
Abstract
Young children today are exposed to masks on a regular basis. However, there is limited empirical evidence on how masks may affect word learning. The study explored the effect of masks on infants' abilities to fast-map and generalize new words. Seventy-two Chinese infants (43 males, Mage = 18.26 months) were taught two novel word-object pairs by a speaker with or without a mask. They then heard the words and had to visually identify the correct objects and also generalize words to a different speaker and objects from the same category. Eye-tracking results indicate that infants looked longer at the target regardless of whether a speaker wore a mask. They also looked longer at the speaker's eyes than at the mouth only when words were taught through a mask. Thus, fast-mapping and generalization occur in both masked and not masked conditions as infants can flexibly access different visual cues during word-learning.
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Affiliation(s)
- Siying Liu
- Institute of Linguistics, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
| | - Xun Li
- Institute of Linguistics, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
| | - Renji Sun
- East China University of Political Science and Law, China
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Schott E, Tamayo MP, Byers‐Heinlein K. Keeping track of language: Can monolingual and bilingual infants associate a speaker with the language they speak? INFANT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 2023. [DOI: 10.1002/icd.2403] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/11/2023]
Affiliation(s)
- Esther Schott
- Department of Psychology Concordia University Montreal Quebec Canada
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Crimon C, Barbir M, Hagihara H, de Araujo E, Nozawa S, Shinya Y, Abboub N, Tsuji S. Mask wearing in Japanese and French nursery schools: The perceived impact of masks on communication. Front Psychol 2022; 13. [PMID: 36420380 PMCID: PMC9677818 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.874264] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 08/15/2023] Open
Abstract
Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, covering the mouth region with a face mask became pervasive in many regions of the world, potentially impacting how people communicate with and around children. To explore the characteristics of this masked communication, we asked nursery school educators, who have been at the forefront of daily masked interaction with children, about their perception of daily communicative interactions while wearing a mask in an online survey. We collected data from French and Japanese nursery school educators to gain an understanding of commonalities and differences in communicative behavior with face masks given documented cultural differences in pre-pandemic mask wearing habits, face scanning patterns, and communicative behavior. Participants (177 French and 138 Japanese educators) reported a perceived change in their own communicative behavior while wearing a mask, with decreases in language quantity and increases in language quality and non-verbal cues. Comparable changes in their team members’ and children’s communicative behaviors were also reported. Moreover, our results suggest that these changes in educators’ communicative behaviors are linked to their attitudes toward mask wearing and their potential difficulty in communicating following its use. These findings shed light on the impact of pandemic-induced mask wearing on children’s daily communicative environment.
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King H, Chitoran I. Difficult to hear but easy to see: Audio-visual perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2022; 152:368. [PMID: 35931552 DOI: 10.1121/10.0012660] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/22/2021] [Accepted: 06/23/2022] [Indexed: 06/15/2023]
Abstract
This paper investigates the influence of visual cues in the perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast in Anglo-English. Audio-visual perception of Anglo-English /r/ warrants attention because productions are increasingly non-lingual, labiodental (e.g., [ʋ]), possibly involving visual prominence of the lips for the post-alveolar approximant [ɹ]. Forty native speakers identified [ɹ] and [w] stimuli in four presentation modalities: auditory-only, visual-only, congruous audio-visual, and incongruous audio-visual. Auditory stimuli were presented in noise. The results indicate that native Anglo-English speakers can identify [ɹ] and [w] from visual information alone with almost perfect accuracy. Furthermore, visual cues dominate the perception of the /r/-/w/ contrast when auditory and visual cues are mismatched. However, auditory perception is ambiguous because participants tend to perceive both [ɹ] and [w] as /r/. Auditory ambiguity is related to Anglo-English listeners' exposure to acoustic variation for /r/, especially to [ʋ], which is often confused with [w]. It is suggested that a specific labial configuration for Anglo-English /r/ encodes the contrast with /w/ visually, compensating for the ambiguous auditory contrast. An audio-visual enhancement hypothesis is proposed, and the findings are discussed with regard to sound change.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hannah King
- Université Paris Cité, UFR Linguistique, CLILLAC-ARP, F-75013 Paris, France
| | - Ioana Chitoran
- Université Paris Cité, UFR Linguistique, CLILLAC-ARP, F-75013 Paris, France
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Gijbels L, Yeatman JD, Lalonde K, Lee AKC. Audiovisual Speech Processing in Relationship to Phonological and Vocabulary Skills in First Graders. JOURNAL OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND HEARING RESEARCH : JSLHR 2021; 64:5022-5040. [PMID: 34735292 PMCID: PMC9150669 DOI: 10.1044/2021_jslhr-21-00196] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/02/2021] [Revised: 07/06/2021] [Accepted: 08/11/2021] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
PURPOSE It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to speech-in-noise recognition in children in first grade and if visual salience of phonemes influences their AV benefit. We explored if individual differences in AV speech enhancement could be explained by vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, or general psychophysical testing performance. METHOD Thirty-seven first graders completed online psychophysical experiments. We used an online single-interval, four-alternative forced-choice picture-pointing task with age-appropriate consonant-vowel-consonant words to measure auditory-only, visual-only, and AV word recognition in noise at -2 and -8 dB SNR. We obtained standard measures of vocabulary and phonological awareness and included a general psychophysical test to examine correlations with AV benefits. RESULTS We observed a significant overall AV gain among children in first grade. This effect was mainly attributed to the benefit at -8 dB SNR, for visually distinct targets. Individual differences were not explained by any of the child variables. Boys showed lower auditory-only performances, leading to significantly larger AV gains. CONCLUSIONS This study shows AV benefit, of distinctive visual cues, to word recognition in challenging noisy conditions in first graders. The cognitive and linguistic constraints of the task may have minimized the impact of individual differences of vocabulary and phonological awareness on AV benefit. The gender difference should be studied on a larger sample and age range.
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Affiliation(s)
- Liesbeth Gijbels
- Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle
- Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle
| | - Jason D. Yeatman
- Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, School of Medicine, Stanford University, CA
- Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, CA
| | - Kaylah Lalonde
- Boys Town National Research Hospital, Center for Hearing Research, Omaha, NE
| | - Adrian K. C. Lee
- Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle
- Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle
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Lalonde K, McCreery RW. Audiovisual Enhancement of Speech Perception in Noise by School-Age Children Who Are Hard of Hearing. Ear Hear 2021; 41:705-719. [PMID: 32032226 PMCID: PMC7822589 DOI: 10.1097/aud.0000000000000830] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/26/2022]
Abstract
OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to examine age- and hearing-related differences in school-age children's benefit from visual speech cues. The study addressed three questions: (1) Do age and hearing loss affect degree of audiovisual (AV) speech enhancement in school-age children? (2) Are there age- and hearing-related differences in the mechanisms underlying AV speech enhancement in school-age children? (3) What cognitive and linguistic variables predict individual differences in AV benefit among school-age children? DESIGN Forty-eight children between 6 and 13 years of age (19 with mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss; 29 with normal hearing) and 14 adults with normal hearing completed measures of auditory and AV syllable detection and/or sentence recognition in a two-talker masker type and a spectrally matched noise. Children also completed standardized behavioral measures of receptive vocabulary, visuospatial working memory, and executive attention. Mixed linear modeling was used to examine effects of modality, listener group, and masker on sentence recognition accuracy and syllable detection thresholds. Pearson correlations were used to examine the relationship between individual differences in children's AV enhancement (AV-auditory-only) and age, vocabulary, working memory, executive attention, and degree of hearing loss. RESULTS Significant AV enhancement was observed across all tasks, masker types, and listener groups. AV enhancement of sentence recognition was similar across maskers, but children with normal hearing exhibited less AV enhancement of sentence recognition than adults with normal hearing and children with hearing loss. AV enhancement of syllable detection was greater in the two-talker masker than the noise masker, but did not vary significantly across listener groups. Degree of hearing loss positively correlated with individual differences in AV benefit on the sentence recognition task in noise, but not on the detection task. None of the cognitive and linguistic variables correlated with individual differences in AV enhancement of syllable detection or sentence recognition. CONCLUSIONS Although AV benefit to syllable detection results from the use of visual speech to increase temporal expectancy, AV benefit to sentence recognition requires that an observer extracts phonetic information from the visual speech signal. The findings from this study suggest that all listener groups were equally good at using temporal cues in visual speech to detect auditory speech, but that adults with normal hearing and children with hearing loss were better than children with normal hearing at extracting phonetic information from the visual signal and/or using visual speech information to access phonetic/lexical representations in long-term memory. These results suggest that standard, auditory-only clinical speech recognition measures likely underestimate real-world speech recognition skills of children with mild to severe hearing loss.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kaylah Lalonde
- Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, USA
| | - Ryan W. McCreery
- Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, USA
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Singh L, Tan A, Quinn PC. Infants recognize words spoken through opaque masks but not through clear masks. Dev Sci 2021; 24:e13117. [PMID: 33942441 PMCID: PMC8236912 DOI: 10.1111/desc.13117] [Citation(s) in RCA: 19] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/28/2020] [Revised: 04/20/2021] [Accepted: 04/22/2021] [Indexed: 12/20/2022]
Abstract
COVID-19 has modified numerous aspects of children's social environments. Many children are now spoken to through a mask. There is little empirical evidence attesting to the effects of masked language input on language processing. In addition, not much is known about the effects of clear masks (i.e., transparent face shields) versus opaque masks on language comprehension in children. In the current study, 2-year-old infants were tested on their ability to recognize familiar spoken words in three conditions: words presented with no mask, words presented through a clear mask, and words presented through an opaque mask. Infants were able to recognize familiar words presented without a mask and when hearing words through opaque masks, but not when hearing words through clear masks. Findings suggest that the ability of infants to recover spoken language input through masks varies depending on the surface properties of the mask.
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Affiliation(s)
- Leher Singh
- Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore
| | - Agnes Tan
- Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore
| | - Paul C Quinn
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA
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Lalonde K, Werner LA. Development of the Mechanisms Underlying Audiovisual Speech Perception Benefit. Brain Sci 2021; 11:49. [PMID: 33466253 PMCID: PMC7824772 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci11010049] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/05/2020] [Revised: 12/30/2020] [Accepted: 12/30/2020] [Indexed: 02/07/2023] Open
Abstract
The natural environments in which infants and children learn speech and language are noisy and multimodal. Adults rely on the multimodal nature of speech to compensate for noisy environments during speech communication. Multiple mechanisms underlie mature audiovisual benefit to speech perception, including reduced uncertainty as to when auditory speech will occur, use of correlations between the amplitude envelope of auditory and visual signals in fluent speech, and use of visual phonetic knowledge for lexical access. This paper reviews evidence regarding infants' and children's use of temporal and phonetic mechanisms in audiovisual speech perception benefit. The ability to use temporal cues for audiovisual speech perception benefit emerges in infancy. Although infants are sensitive to the correspondence between auditory and visual phonetic cues, the ability to use this correspondence for audiovisual benefit may not emerge until age four. A more cohesive account of the development of audiovisual speech perception may follow from a more thorough understanding of the development of sensitivity to and use of various temporal and phonetic cues.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kaylah Lalonde
- Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE 68131, USA
| | - Lynne A. Werner
- Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, USA;
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Halverson DM, Lalonde K. Does visual speech provide release from perceptual masking in children? THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2020; 148:EL221. [PMID: 33003896 PMCID: PMC7731949 DOI: 10.1121/10.0001867] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/29/2020] [Revised: 08/12/2020] [Accepted: 08/13/2020] [Indexed: 06/11/2023]
Abstract
Adults benefit more from visual speech in speech maskers than in noise maskers because visual speech helps perceptually isolate target talkers from competing talkers. To investigate whether children use visual speech to perceptually isolate target talkers, this study compared children's speech recognition thresholds in auditory and audiovisual condition across two maskers: two-talker speech and noise. Children demonstrated similar audiovisual benefit in both maskers. Individual differences in speechreading accuracy predicted audiovisual benefit in each masker to a similar degree. Results suggest that although visual speech improves children's masked speech recognition thresholds, children may use visual speech in different ways than adults.
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Affiliation(s)
- Destinee M Halverson
- Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, Nebraska 68104, ,
| | - Kaylah Lalonde
- Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, Nebraska 68104, ,
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