Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in audiovisual speech perception and temporal processing. The current study has examined the relationship between the audiovisual speech perception deficits and temporal processing deficits in children with and without ASD. To this end, using the McGurk paradigm, we implemented two…

Although statistical learning (SL) has been studied extensively in developmental dyslexia (DD), less attention has been paid to other fundamental challenges in language acquisition, such as cross-situational word learning. Such investigation is important for determining whether and how SL processes are affected in DD at the word level. In this…

To communicate, children must discriminate and identify speech sounds. Because visual speech plays an important role in this process, we explored how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification by children. Critical items had intact visual speech (e.g. baez) coupled to non-intact (excised onsets) auditory speech (signified…

For children who are born deaf, lipreading (speechreading) is an important source of access to spoken language. We used eye tracking to investigate the strategies used by deaf (n = 33) and hearing 5-8-year-olds (n = 59) during a sentence speechreading task. The proportion of time spent looking at the mouth during speech correlated positively with…

Purpose: The role of vision in speech representation was investigated in congenitally blind speakers and sighted speakers by studying the correlates of contrastive focus, a prosodic condition in which phonemic contrasts are enhanced. It has been reported that the lips (visible articulators) are less involved in implementing the rounding feature…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often described as visual learners. We tested this assumption in an experiment in which 25 children with ASD, 19 children with global developmental delay (GDD), and 17 typically developing (TD) children were presented a series of videos via an eye tracker in which an actor instructed them to…

When the auditory and visual components of spoken audiovisual nonsense syllables are mismatched, perceivers produce four different types of perceptual responses, auditory correct, visual correct, fusion (the so-called "McGurk effect"), and combination (i.e., two consonants are reported). Here, quantitative measures were developed to account for…

Purpose: To examine age-related differences in auditory speech recognition and visual text recognition performance for parallel sets of stimulus materials in the auditory and visual modalities. In addition, the effects of variation in rate of presentation of stimuli in each modality were investigated in each age group. Method: A mixed-model design…