JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 66, 85–110 (1997) ARTICLE NO. CH972379 An Exploration of Why Preschoolers Perform Differently Than Do Adults in Audiovisual Speech Perception Tasks

Preschoolers ’ perception of audiovisual speech is considerably less influenced by visual information than adults’. We test the hypothesis that experience correctly pro-ducing consonants plays a role in developing the underlying representation which mediates the perception of visible speech. We divided preschoolers into two groups: those who made substitution errors and those who did not. Using a newly developed methodology, we tested substituters, nonsubstituters, and adults in an auditory-only condition, a visual-only condition, and an audiovisual condition. There were no differ-ences among groups in the auditory-only condition. Overall, children still showed less visual influence than adults. Among the children, substituters were poorer at lip-reading in the visual-only condition and showed less visual influence on the incongru-ent audiovisual tokens than did nonsubstituters. These results support our hypothesis that experience correctly producing consonants plays a role in the elaboration of the underlying representation. q 1997 Academic Press There is a growing literature documenting the influence of visual informa-tion (i.e., lip-read information) on the perception of speech in hearing adults. Although there are large individual differences in the extent to which visual information influences speech perception, all of us can and do lip-read much more than we might believe (Summerfield, 1991). Much of the current interest in audiovisual speech perception stems from the surprising finding that even under optimal listening conditions, watching a speaker’s lip and mouth move-ments influences what speech sound is heard. In the initial demonstration of This project was designed and conducted by the second author, John Rogers, for an undergradu-ate research project under the direction of the other two authors. Valuable suggestions were made by Michael Chandler and the reviewers. The research was supported by Natural Sciences an