What is the Visual Habituation Procedure? The Visual Habituation (VH) Procedure Over the past 30 years, language acquisition researchers have developed a number of behavioral methodologies to explore the speech perception and language skills of normal-hearing infants (Jusczyk, 1997). A well established methodology for assessing speech discrimination skills in this age range is the Visual Habituation (VH) procedure. The VH procedure is based on the finding that infants will increase their visual fixation times in the presence of novelty. For many years, VH has been used to investigate infant visual perception (e.g., Cohen, 1969; Kagan & Moss, 1965). In the mid-70s, Horowitz (1975) showed that infants look longer at a visual display when they are listening to an auditory stimulus than when there is no sound present. Since then, researchers have used this basic finding to design experimental paradigms that test infant speech perception abilities. For example, VH has been used extensively to show that infants are able to discriminate nonnative phoneme contrasts (e.g., Best, McRoberts, & Sithole, 1988; Polka & Werker, 1994). The underlying assumption here is that over repeated presentations of a single auditory stimulus paired with a visual stimulus, habituation will occur and fixation to the visual stimulus will eventually decrease. If a novel auditory stimulus is then presented paired with the same visual stimulus, and the infant can discriminate the two auditory stimuli, then visual fixation should increase (Horowitz, 1975; Werker et al., 1998). Return to What to Expect When You Visit. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU VISIT | SCHEDULE & DIRECTIONS | LINKS TO LITERATURE | OUR PHOTO ALBUM | PEOPLE | PRESS | PUBLICATIONS | AFFILIATES | CONTACT US | HOME |