Selective attention to a talker's mouth in infancy: role of audiovisual temporal synchrony and linguistic experience.

Abstract in brief

• Infants initially focus more on a talker's eyes but switch to the mouth after 6 months, especially during the babbling stage, and this shift is influenced by audiovisual synchrony and language experience.
• The study showed that when audiovisual speech was desynchronized, infants' attention to the mouth was disrupted at 10 months, indicating that synchrony helps infants focus on the mouth during key language development stages.
• The importance of audiovisual synchrony for focusing on the mouth decreases after 10 months as infants become more proficient with their native language, suggesting their attention shifts as they develop language skills.]