Mathilde Fort

Université Grenoble Alpes · Department of Psychology

Over the last few decades, developmental (psycho) linguists have demonstrated that perceiving talking faces audio-visually is important for early language acquisition. Using mostly well-controlled and screen-based laboratory approaches, this line of research has shown that paying attention to talking faces is likely to be one of the powerful strate...

To prevent the spread of COVID‐19, face masks were mandatory in many public spaces around the world. Since faces are the gateway to early social cognition, this raised major concerns about the effect face masks may have on infants' attention to faces as well as on their language and social development. The goal of the present study was to assess ho...

The "bouba-kiki effect", where "bouba" is perceived round and "kiki" spiky, remains a puzzling enigma. We solve it by combining mathematical findings largely unknown in the field, with computational models and novel experimental evidence. We reveal that this effect relies on two acoustic cues: spectral balance and temporal continuity. We demonstrat...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to make the wearing of masks mandatory in the public space to limit the spread of the Coronavirus throughout the world. The implementation of such a health measure has raised many concerns and questions among the general population. What does research on this issue show? Recent research, which has been...

Between 6 and 9 months, while infant’s ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as prese...

During their first year, infants attune to the faces and language(s) that are frequent in their environment. The present study investigates the impact of language familiarity on how French‐learning 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds recognize own‐race faces. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with the talking face of a Caucasian bilingual German‐French s...

The existence of critical or sensitive periods has been argued for cognitive functions such as language, which allows for communication with conspecifics. Faces also play a crucial role in establishing social communication. Here we discuss if critical or sensitive period concepts apply to face processing. We describe how experience shapes face proc...

Adults and toddlers systematically associate pseudowords such as ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’ with round and spiky shapes respectively, a sound symbolic phenomenon known as the “bouba-kiki effect”. To date, whether this sound symbolic effect is a property of the infant brain present at birth or is a learned aspect of language perception remains unknown. Yet,...

To probably overcome the challenge of learning two languages at the same time, infants raised in a bilingual environment pay more attention to the mouth of talking faces than same-age monolinguals. Here we examined the consequences of such preference for monolingual and bilingual infants’ ability to perceive nonspeech information coming from the ey...

By the end of their first year of life, infants have become experts in discriminating the sounds of their native language, while they have lost the ability to discriminate non-native contrasts. This type of phonetic learning is referred to as perceptual attunement. In the present study, we investigated the emergence of a context-dependent form of p...

In contrast to the long-held view that the relationship between the sounds and meaning of a word is arbitrary (de Saussure, 1959), numerous more recent studies have shown an influence of sound symbolism on word perception: Perceivers systematically associate pseudowords, such as ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’, with round and spiky shapes, respectively (adults:...

In contrast to the long-held view that the relationship between the sounds and meaning of a word is arbitrary (de Saussure, 1959), numerous more recent studies have shown an influence of sound symbolism on word perception: Perceivers systematically associate pseudowords, such as ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’, with round and spiky shapes, respectively (adults:...

A core issue in speech perception and word recognition research is the nature of information perceivers use to identify spoken utterances across indexical variations in their phonetic details, such as talker and accent differences. Separately, a crucial question in audiovisual research is the nature of information perceivers use to recognize phonet...

In this study we investigate whether paying attention to a speaker's mouth impacts 15-and 18-month-old infants' ability to process visual information displayed in the talker's eyes or mouth region. Our results showed that both monolingual and bilingual 15 month-olds could detect the apparition of visual information appearing in the eyes/mouth regio...

Adult listeners systematically associate certain speech sounds with round or spiky shapes, a sound-symbolic phenomenon known as the “bouba-kiki effect.” In this study, we investigate the respective influences of consonants and vowels in this phenomenon. French participants were asked to match auditorily presented pseudowords with one of two visuall...

When the auditory information is deteriorated by noise in a conversation, watching the face of a speaker enhances speech intelligibility. Recent findings indicate that decoding the facial movements of a speaker accelerates word recognition. The objective of this study was to provide evidence that the mere presentation of the first two phonemesthat...

The goal of this study was to explore whether viewing the speaker’s articulatory gestures contributes to lexical access in children (ages 5–10) and in adults. We conducted a vowel monitoring task with words and pseudo-words in audio-only (AO) and audiovisual (AV) contexts with white noise masking the acoustic signal. The results indicated that chil...

Seeing the facial gestures of a speaker enhances phonemic identification in noise. The goal of this study was to assess whether the visual information regarding consonant articulation activates lexical representations. We conducted a phoneme monitoring task with word and pseudo-words in audio only (A) and audiovisual (AV) contexts with two levels o...