Audiovisual Speech Perception Benefits are Stable from Preschool through Adolescence

What is it about?

The current work underscores the importance of visual speech for young children who are regularly in noisy environments like classrooms and playgrounds by showing that when using cognitively and linguistically age-appropriate tasks, children from preschool to adolescence perceive reliable speech perception benefits in noisy environments when provided with visual cues (articulatory movements of the mouth) on top of the speech input. These benefits are consistent throughout development, when the auditory and visual signals match. Individual variability is explained by how the child experiences their speech-in-noise performance rather than the quality of the signal itself.

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