Empirical Research Critique
...After a month, the children were then run through experiments of visual stimulus only, auditory stimulus only, and audiovisual stimuli combined. In these tests, the children determined whatever syllable they thought was being presented, and then they would point to the related toy animal. The adults participated in the same tests, except they told the experimenter which syllable was heard rather than pointing at a toy. The findings in this experiment were that the children were better at detecting speech when only an auditory stimulus was present, but adults detected visual and audiovisual stimuli more accurately. Also, it was discovered that children that substitute syllables in speech, were worse at lip-reading and used visual influence less on audiovisual stimuli. The author’s of this empirical research felt that this experiment backed up their hypothesis that the familiarity of adults to speech makes them more reliant on visual cues in speech, where children rely more on auditory stimuli. The study seems very relevant in the field of child psychology in making progress in the knowledge of the way children develop. But on the other hand, I think this experiment would have to be taken a step farther, in the since of giving it a direction in solving a problem or purpose, for it to be truly ground breaking. But what I feel was probably somewhat truly ground breaking in this study was in the way the experimenters discovered a better way to study the responses of young children in this type of experiment. The way they got the children to memoriz...