The multisensory cocktail party problem in children: Synchrony-based segregation of multiple talking faces improves in early childhood

Extraction of meaningful information from multiple talkers relies on perceptual segregation. The temporal synchrony statistics inherent in everyday audiovisual (AV) speech offer a powerful basis for perceptual segregation. We investigated the developmental emergence of synchrony-based perceptual segregation of multiple talkers in 3–7-year-old children. Children either saw four identical or four different faces articulating temporally jittered versions of the same utterance and heard the audible version of the same utterance either synchronized with one of the talkers or desynchronized with all of them. Eye tracking revealed that selective attention to the temporally synchronized talking face increased while attention to the desynchronized faces decreased with age and that attention to the talkers' mouth primarily drove responsiveness. These findings demonstrate that the temporal synchrony statistics inherent in fluent AV speech assume an increasingly greater role in perceptual segregation of the multisensory clutter created by multiple talking faces in early childhood.