Literacy Skills are Related to Audiovisual Speech Perception in School-Aged Children

Does learning to read influence children’s audiovisual (AV) speech perception? This study aimed to answer this question by delving into whether the process of learning to read in Uzbek, a language with a transparent orthography, influences the sensitivity to AV speech cues (i.e., mouth movements corresponding to phonetic/lexical information). Furthermore, the study examined the mediating role of phonological awareness (PA) skills in potentially linking reading and AV speech sensitivity. 283 pre-readers (age=5-6 years) and readers (age=7-10 years) in Tashkent, Uzbekistan completed PA, AV speech perception, and reading assessments. Overall, better reading skills predicted increased sensitivity to AV speech cues. These findings suggest that there is a potential shared mechanism between reading and AV speech perception. However, in the case of languages with transparent orthographies, this shared mechanism does not seem to be significantly mediated by phonological awareness skills of children.