Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills…

To benefit from the exploration of their bodies and their physical and social environments, infants need to detect sensorimotor contingencies linking their actions to sensory feedback. This ability, which seems to be present in babies from birth and even in utero, has been widely used by researchers in their study of early development. However, a…

From birth, human infants are able to perceive a wide range of intersensory relationships. The current experiment examined whether infants between 6 months and 24 months old perceive the intermodal relationship between aggressive and nonaggressive canine vocalizations (i.e., barks) and appropriate canine facial expressions. Infants simultaneously…

In this article, the authors introduce a new theoretical framework for understanding intersensory development. Their approach is based upon insights gained from adults who experience synesthesia, in whom sensory stimuli induce extra cross-modal or intramodal percepts. Synesthesia appears to represent one way that typical developmental mechanisms…

Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select…

This research examined the developmental course of infants' ability to perceive affect in bimodal (audiovisual) and unimodal (auditory and visual) displays of a woman speaking. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (L. E. Bahrick, R. Lickliter, & R. Flom, 2004), detection of amodal properties is facilitated in multimodal stimulation…

Three studies were designed to examine infants' bisensory responsiveness to temporally modulated stimulation by varying frequency while keeping intensity constant, by varying both frequency and intensity together, and by varying intensity while keeping temporal frequency constant. Findings indicate that sound influences visual preferences via…

Three experiments assessed the intersensory redundancy hypothesis in early infancy. Findings indicated that habituation to a bimodal rhythm resulted in discrimination of a novel rhythm, whereas habituation to the same rhythm presented unimodally resulted in no evidence of discrimination. Temporal synchrony between the bimodal auditory and visual…