Audiovisual Matching in Lips and Voice on Vowel /i/ by Japanese-Learning Infants

Abstract

A previous study (Mugitani et al. 2004) indicated that 8-month-old Japanese infants match the phonetic information of vowel /a/ to its respective visible lip articulation, while such audiovisual matching of lips and voice was not evidenced for vowel /i/. This study aimed at further verifying the development of audiovisual lip-voice matching of vowel /i/ in Japanese infants. Experiment 1 indicated that at 11 months Japanese infants could match vowel /i/. Experiment 2 suggested that Japanese 8-month olds still show no evidence of lip-voice matching of vowel /i/, although the familiarity of articulation manner was controlled. Longitudinal analysis on a child-mother speech database revealed that Japanese children at any age experience vowel /i/ less frequently in both perception and production. These findings indicate that, in Japanese infants, lip-voice matching of vowel /i/ develops between 8 and 11 months of age; the development is possibly effected by language-specific visual and motor experience of vowel articulation.