Violation of non-adjacent rule dependencies elicits greater attention to a talker's mouth in 15-month-old infants

Abstract

Infants start tracking auditory-only non-adjacent dependencies (NAD) between 15 and 18 months of age. Given that audiovisual speech, normally available in a talker's mouth, is perceptually more salient than auditory speech and that it facilitates speech processing and language acquisition, we investigated whether 15-month-old infants' NAD learning is modulated by attention to a talker's mouth. Infants performed an audiovisual NAD learning task while we recorded their selective attention to the eyes, mouth, and face of an actress while she spoke an artificial language that followed an AXB structure (tis-X-bun; nal-X-gor) during familiarization. At test, the actress spoke the same language (grammatical trials; tis-X-bun; nal-X-gor) or a novel one that violated the AXB structure (ungrammatical trials; tis-X-gor; nal-X bun). Overall, total duration of looking did not differ during the familiar and novel test trials but the time-course of selective attention to the talker's face and mouth revealed that the novel trials maintained infants' attention to the face more than did the familiar trials. Crucially, attention to the mouth increased during the novel test trials while it did not change during the familiar test trials. These results indicate that the multisensory redundancy of audiovisual speech facilitates infants' discrimination of non-adjacent dependencies.