Perception of Facial Movements in Early Infancy: Some Reflections in Relation to Speech Perception

Abstract

Some aspects of the literature dedicated to the study of perception of facial features and movements by infants are examined. More particularly, we try to analyze the kind of visual information infants can process at different ages, and how this may be linked to their developing speech perception. Empirical data related to imitation of facial movements, to prespeech activity, to lip-reading ability and auditory-visual integration are reviewed. These data show that the ability of young infants to encode face features and process facial information undergoes a complex development in the first year of life. In the final part of this paper, we discuss briefly the relationships between face perception processes and visual speech perception within a developmental and cognitive framework. A central concern in this discussion is related to the "segmentation" problem, i.e. to the nature of the unit of perception used when speech is processed.