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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: ferran.pons@ub.edu
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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

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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).

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