Children perceive speech onsets by ear and eye.
Susan Jerger, Markus F Damian, Nancy Tye-Murray and 1 others
PMID 26752548WHAT IT FOUND
Seeing a talker's mouth moving helped children from four to fourteen name pictures faster in a lab task, especially when the heard onset was incomplete.
The visual help was strongest for unfamiliar nonwords.
Key findings
01Greater priming occurred in the audiovisual mode than the auditory mode [−160 ms vs. −104 ms].
02The visual speech effect was larger for non-intact than intact onsets [−77 ms vs. −34 ms].
03For non-intact onsets, the visual speech effect was larger for nonwords than words [91 ms vs. 62 ms].
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The children were laboratory participants with normal hearing and vocabulary standard scores about 120, so the results may not apply to children with hearing loss or lower verbal skills. The task measured picture naming speed with distractors, not everyday speech understanding or therapy outcomes. Only /b/ and /g/ onsets were tested, with 8 experimental pictures and 12 distractors. The five-year-olds had slower baseline naming times, which complicates interpretation of age differences. Visual speech did not make incomplete onsets as effective as complete ones. The study was not a treatment trial.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that showing a child's mouth will improve clinical speech or naming outcomes. The study used a laboratory picture naming task and did not test an intervention or clinical speech outcome. This is not evidence for a therapy.