Audio-Visual Perception of Gender by Infants Emerges Earlier for Adult-Directed Speech
Date
2017-01-06
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Public Library of Science
Abstract
Early multisensory perceptual experiences shape the abilities of infants to perform sociallyrelevant
visual categorization, such as the extraction of gender, age, and emotion from
faces. Here, we investigated whether multisensory perception of gender is influenced by
infant-directed (IDS) or adult-directed (ADS) speech. Six-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants saw
side-by-side silent video-clips of talking faces (a male and a female) and heard either a
soundtrack of a female or a male voice telling a story in IDS or ADS. Infants participated in
only one condition, either IDS or ADS. Consistent with earlier work, infants displayed advantages
in matching female relative to male faces and voices. Moreover, the new finding that
emerged in the current study was that extraction of gender from face and voice was stronger
at 6 months with ADS than with IDS, whereas at 9 and 12 months, matching did not differ
for IDS versus ADS. The results indicate that the ability to perceive gender in audiovisual
speech is influenced by speech manner. Our data suggest that infants may extract multisensory
gender information developmentally earlier when looking at adults engaged in conversation
with other adults (i.e., ADS) than when adults are directly talking to them (i.e., IDS).
Overall, our findings imply that the circumstances of social interaction may shape early multisensory
abilities to perceive gender.
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Citation
Richoz A-R, Quinn PC, Hillairet de Boisferon A, Berger C, Loevenbruck H, Lewkowicz DJ, et al. (2017) Audio-Visual Perception of Gender by Infants Emerges Earlier for Adult-Directed Speech. PLoS ONE 12(1): e0169325. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0169325