The development of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children: Evidence from the McGurk paradigm

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of auditory noise. For the identification of congruent stimuli, 3- to 4-year-olds underperformed older groups whose performances were comparable. For the perception of the incongruent stimuli, a developmental shift was observed as 3- to 4-year-olds made significantly more audio-dominant but fewer audiovisual-integrated responses to incongruent stimuli than older groups. With increasing auditory noise, the difference between children and adults widened in identifying congruent stimuli but narrowed in perceiving incongruent ones. The findings regarding noise effects agree with the statistically optimal hypothesis.