The development of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children

Existing findings suggest that the developmental shift of audiovisual speech perception is subject to cultural variation, and previous studies failed to observe it in Mandarin-speaking children. The current study revisits this issue by performing the McGurk paradigm on a large sample consisting of 61 children aged 3–4 (n = 20), 5–6 (n = 21), 7–8 (n = 20) years and 26 adults aged 18–22 years. Results revealed a dramatic shift occurring at around five as 3–4-year-olds made significantly more “Ba” (auditory) and fewer “Da” (audiovisual) responses in incongruent trials (AbVg) than older groups. Spearman’s correlation showed that age negatively correlated with “Ba” but positively with “Da” responses. Results supported that Mandarin-speaking children undergo a developmental shift from biasing unimodal auditory information to integrating audiovisual information in speech perception at an earlier age rather than not necessarily undergoing the shift.