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 (i.e., mouth movements corresponding to phonetic/lexical information) versus auditory-only (AO) speech cues. Furthermore, the study examined the mediating role of phonological awareness (PA) skills in potentially linking reading and AV speech perception sensitivity.321 pre-readers (age=4-6 years) and readers (age=7-10 years) in Tashkent, Uzbekistan completed PA, AV and AO speech perception, and reading assessments. Overall, both pre-readers and readers showed higher sensitivity to AV speech cues compared to AO speech cues. Readers displayed stronger sensitivity to both AV and AO cues compared to pre-readers. Among readers, better reading skills predicted increased sensitivity to both AV and AO cues. PA mediated the association between reading skills and sensitivity to AO cues but not AV cues, highlighting its explanatory role in this context.Overall, these findings suggest that there is a potential shared mechanism between reading and AV speech perception. In the case of languages with transparent orthographies, this shared mechanism does not seem to be mediated by phonological awareness skills of children.