Early Emergence of Cultural Differences in Audiovisual Speech Perception

Researchers investigated whether cultural differences in reliance on visual speech are established in infancy. They used a novel paradigm to measure the McGurk effect in 6- to 12-month-old White Canadian (n=111) and Chinese (n=115) infants across four experiments. Canadian infants showed a stable McGurk effect from 6 months onward, whereas Chinese infants exhibited a more protracted developmental trajectory. This cultural divergence was even more pronounced when integration was challenged by other-race faces. The findings provide the first direct evidence that cultural differences in multisensory speech perception are established within the first year of life, suggesting early experience shapes the brain's strategy for binding sight and sound, with implications for language acquisition and developmental science.