In everyday life, children hear but also often see their caregiver talking. Children build on this correspondence to resolve auditory uncertainties and decipher words from the speech input. As they hear the name of an object, 18- to 30-month-olds form a representation that permits word recognition in either the auditory (i.e. acoustic form of the…

Normal auditory perception relies on accurate judgments about the temporal relationships between sounds. Previously, we used a perceptual-learning paradigm to investigate the neural substrates of two such relative-timing judgments made at sound onset: detecting stimulus asynchrony and discriminating stimulus order. Here, we conducted parallel…

Three investigations are reported which indicate that infants between 4 and 17 weeks of age are able to detect some differences in sounds upon which phonemic contrasts are based. (Authors)

Examines the development of intermodal perception in infancy by means of a new method, the intermodal learning method. Results support the claim that only subjects who had been familiarized with appropriate and synchronous film and soundtrack pairs showed evidence of intermodal learning. (Author/RWB)