Abstract The current study utilized eye-tracking to investigate the effects of intersensory redundancy and language on infant visual attention and detection of a change in prosody in audiovisual speech. Twelve-month-old monolingual English-learning infants viewed either synchronous (redundant) or asynchronous (non-redundant) presentations of a woman speaking in native or non-native speech. Halfway through each trial, the speaker changed prosody from infant-directed speech (IDS) to adult-directed speech (ADS) or vice versa. Infants focused more on the mouth of the speaker on IDS trials compared to ADS trials regardless of language or intersensory redundancy. Additionally, infants demonstrated greater detection of prosody changes from IDS speech to ADS speech in native speech. Planned comparisons indicated that infants detected prosody changes across a broader range of conditions during redundant stimulus presentations. These findings shed light on the influence of language and prosody on infant attention and highlight the complexity of audiovisual speech processing in infancy.
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The role of task difficulty in directing selective attention in bobwhite quail ( Colinus virginianus ) neonates: A developmental test of the intersensory redundancy hypothesis
The dynamics of selective attention necessarily influences the course of early perceptual development. The intersensory redundancy hypothesis proposes that in early development information presented redundantly across two or more senses selectively recruits attention to the amodal properties of an object or event. In contrast, information presented to a single sense enhances attention to modality‐specific properties. The present study assessed the second of these predictions in neonatal bobwhite quail (
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10398386
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Developmental Psychobiology
- Volume:
- 65
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0012-1630
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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