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Audiovisual Speech Processing: Implications For Speech Perception And Language Development, Ryan Andrew Cannistraci

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation aims to empirically assess the complex, multileveled relationships between audiovisual speech perception and early language development. The majority of extant language development research has justifiably focused on infants’ ability to learn language from auditory input, and indeed, infants are precocious auditory learners (Saffran & Kirkham, 2018). Complementary to auditory speech, however, are the necessarily redundant facial movements used to articulate speech. Outside of language development research, multimodal processing has been theorized to facilitate perceptual learning and cognitive development (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000), but only a small number of empirical studies have investigated how audiovisual speech perception in infancy …