Long-term phonemic representations become audiovisual by mid-childhood

In earlier work with adults, we showed that long-term phonemic representations are audiovisual, meaning that they contain information on typical mouth shape during articulation. Many aspects of audiovisual processing have a prolonged developmental course, often not reaching maturity until late adolescence. In this study, we examined the status of phonemic representations in two groups of children – 8-9-year-olds and 11-12-year-olds. We used the same audiovisual oddball paradigm as in the earlier study with adults (Kaganovich and Christ, 2021). On each trial, participants saw a face and heard one of two vowels. One vowel occurred frequently (standard), while another occurred rarely (deviant). In one condition (neutral), the face had a closed, non-articulating mouth. In the other condition (audiovisual violation), the mouth shape matched the frequent vowel. Although stimuli were audiovisual in both conditions, we hypothesized that identical auditory changes would be perceived differently by participants. Namely, in the neutral condition, deviants violated only the audiovisual pattern specific to each experimental block. By contrast, in the audiovisual violation condition, deviants additionally violated long-term representations for how a speaker's mouth looks during articulation. We compared the amplitude of MMN and P3 components elicited by deviants in the two conditions. In the 11-12-year-old group, the pattern of neural responses was similar to that in adults – namely, they had a larger MMN component in the audiovisual compared to neutral condition, with no major difference in the P3 amplitude. In contrast, in the 8-9-year-old group, we saw a posterior MMN in the neutral condition only and a larger P3 in the audiovisual violation compared to the neutral condition. The larger P3 in the audiovisual violation condition suggests that younger children did perceive deviants as being more attention-grabbing when they violated the typical combination of sound and mouth shape. Yet, at this age, the earlier, more automatic stages of phonemic processing indexed by the MMN component may not yet encode visual speech elements the same way they do in older children and adults. We conclude that phonemic representations do not become audiovisual until 11–12 years of age.