Audio-Visual Perception of Gender by Infants Emerges Earlier for Adult-Directed Speech.

ABSTRACT: Early multisensory perceptual experiences shape the abilities of infants to perform socially-relevant 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 an

SUBMITTER: Richoz AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5218491 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature