Newborns' sensitivity to the biological motion of speech

Guellai, B. ¹ , Streri, A. ² & Kitamura, C. ³

1 SISSA-Language Cognition and Development Lab-Trieste
2 University Paris Descartes CNRS UMR 8158
3 MARCS Lab University of Western Sydney

Among the stimuli encountered soon after birth talking faces constitutes one of the most important source of social information. Here we questioned newborns sensitivity to the biological motion of speech. We presented to newborns, only a few hours after birth, two point-light displays representing talking faces moving at the same time side-by-side. Newborns heard only one sentence that belonged to one of the two displays. Analyses of looking behaviors indicated that newborns looked more at the matching stimulus than at the mismatch. Implications in terms of early multimodal speech perception are discussed.