# AUDITORY-VISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN INFANTS AND ADULTS

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON · 1994 · $182,523

## Abstract

The perception of speech is typically considered a solely auditory
phenomenon.  However, research in this lab and others shows that the
perception of speech does not lie solely in the province of audition.
Visible speech information (the sight of a talker's mouth movements)
strongly influences the perception of speech in adult listeners.  Moreover,
our work has shown that connections between the audible and visible
products of articulation are present very early in life; infants only 18
weeks old can relate the auditory consequences of speech to the visible
movements that cause it.  During the last funding period our studies have
focused on the form of the auditory and visual speech information at the
point of cross-modal integration.  We show that: (a) at the point of
auditory-visual conflux speech information has not been phonetically
classified; it is still in a precategorical form, (b) very discrepant
auditory and visual speech information can be combined, such as when a
male's face is combined with a female's voice, and (c) that attentional
mechanisms influence auditory-visual speech perception.  We also show that
in order to link auditory and visual speech information, infants need, on
the auditory side, the whole speech signal.  The work has led to the
formation of a new hypothesis that generates the programmatic series of
studies proposed here.  The hypothesis is that auditory-visual speech
information is mapped on to language-specific stored representations of
phonetic units ("prototypes") that instantiate both the auditory and visual
concomitants of speech sounds.  In the next funding period, we focus on
three themes: (a) auditory-visual prototypes for speech - we will test the
notion that speech prototypes include information about articulation that
is visually specified, (b) cross-language studies of speech prototypes - we
will investigate the influence of specific language experience on the
representation of speech units by studying adults from two countries
(America and Japan), and (c) development of speech prototypes in infants
and young children - we will explore the formation and nature of speech
representations in ontogeny.  The proposed research has implications for
theories of speech perception, more general theories of cognitive
categorization, models of human development, and the clinical concerns of
deaf and blind populations.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 2197627
- **Project number:** 5R01HD018286-10
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
- **SAM.gov UEI:** HD1WMN6945W6
- **Principal Investigator:** PATRICIA K KUHL
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1994
- **Award amount:** $182,523
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1983-12-01 → 1997-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2197627

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 2197627, AUDITORY-VISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN INFANTS AND ADULTS (5R01HD018286-10). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/2197627. Licensed CC0.

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