The present study examined whether infant-directed (ID) speech facilitatesintersensory matching of audio--visual fluent speech in 12-month-old infants.German-learning infants\^a audio--visual matching ability of German and Frenchfluent speech was assessed by using a variant of the intermodal matchingprocedure, with auditory and visual speech information presented sequentially.In Experiment 1, the sentences were spoken in an adult-directed (AD) manner.Results showed that 12-month-old infants did not exhibit a matching performancefor the native, nor for the non-native language. However, Experiment 2 revealedthat when ID speech stimuli were used, infants did perceive the relationbetween auditory and visual speech attributes, but only in response to theirnative language. Thus, the findings suggest that ID speech might have aninfluence on the intersensory perception of fluent speech and shed furtherlight on multisensory perceptual narrowing.
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