Integration of audio-visual information in 8-months-old infants

The results from a series of perception experiments designed to test 8-month-old infants’ ability to derive linguistic information from audio-visual events are reported in this presentation. Using a visual preference technique, groups of 8-month-old infants were tested on their ability to extract linguistic information implicit in short video sequences where the images displayed different puppets and the audio tracks presented sentences describing the puppets in naturalistic infantdirected speech style. To assess the relative importance of memory and attention factors, the prosodic and syntactic structure of the speech materials was systematically changed across different groups of subjects. The experimental results are interpreted in terms of the emergentistic acquisition model discussed in the paper presented by Lacerda et al. (“Ecological theory of language acquisition”).