than for unfamiliar faces when matched to (recorded) voices. Infants are sensitive to McGurk illusions months before they have learned to speak. These studies and many more point to a role for vision in the development of sensitivity to (auditory) speech in the first half-year of life. The next six months; a role in learning a native language Until around six months of age, most hearing infants are sensitive to a wide range of speech gestures - including ones that can be seen on the mouth - which may or may not later be part of the phonology of their native language. But in the second six months of life, the hearing infant shows perceptual narrowing for the phonetic structure of their own language - and may lose the early sensitivity to mouth patterns that are not useful. The speech sounds /v/ and /b/ which are visemically distinctive in English but not in Castilian Spanish are accurately distinguished in Spanish-exposed and English-exposed babies up to the age of around 6 months. However, older Spanish-exposed infants lose the ability to 'see' this distinction, while it is retained for English-exposed infants. Such studies suggest that rather than hearing and vision developing in independent ways in infancy, multimodal processing is the rule, not the exception, in (language) development of the infant brain. Early language production: one to two years Given the many studies indicating a role for vision in the development of language in the pre-lingual infant, the effects of congenital blindness on language development are surprisingly small. 18-month-olds learn new words more readily when they hear them, and do not learn them when they are shown the speech movements without hearing. However, children blind from birth can confuse /m/ and /n/ in their own early production of English words – a confusion rarely seen in sighted hearing children, since /m/ and /n/ are visibly distinctive, but auditorially confusable. The role of vision in children aged 1–2 years may be less critical to the production of their native language, since, by that age, they have attained the skills they need to identify and imitate speech sounds. However, hearing a non-native language can shift the child's attention to visual and auditory engagement by way of lipreading and listening in order to process, understand and produce speech. In childhood Studies with pre-lingual infants and children use indirect, non-verbal measures to indicate sensitivity to seen speech.