Infants match auditory and visual speech in schematic point-light displays

Infants’ sensitivity to visual prosodic motion in infant-directed speech was examined by testing whether 8-month-olds can match an audio-only sentence with its visual-only schematic point-light display. The visual stimuli were sentence pairs of equal duration but unequal syllable number recorded using Optotrak. Twelve of the fourteen 8-month-olds tested looked longer at visual speech motion that matched the audio version of a sentence. This result suggests that the infants can perceive the underlying speech gestures signalled by schematic pointlight displays, and more importantly that they are sensitive to, and able to extract the syllable structure of speech from the talker’s moving face and head.