Language Experience Is Associated with Infants' Visual Attention to Speakers

Abstract

Early social-linguistic experience influences infants' attention to faces but little is known about how infants attend to the faces of speakers engaging in conversation. Here, we examine how monolingual and bilingual infants attended to speakers during a conversation, and we tested for the possibility that infants' visual attention may be modulated by familiarity with the language being spoken. We recorded eye movements in monolingual and bilingual 15-to-24-month-olds as they watched video clips of speakers using infant-directed speech while conversing in a familiar or unfamiliar language, with each other and to the infant. Overall, findings suggest that bilingual infants visually shift attention to a speaker prior to speech onset more when an unfamiliar, rather than a familiar, language is being spoken. However, this same effect was not found for monolingual infants. Thus, infants' familiarity with the language being spoken, and perhaps their language experiences, may modulate infants' visual attention to speakers.

Keywords: bilingualism; infancy; visual social attention.

Figure 1

An example frame from a video used in the free-viewing task. In all six videos, the woman on the left (coded as speaker 1) was always seated on the left-hand side of the screen, and the woman on the right (coded as speaker 2) was always seated on the right-hand side of the screen. It should be noted that the faces are only blurred here to protect the privacy of the actors; the faces were not blurred in the actual stimuli presented to the infants.

Figure 2

The proportion of anticipatory gaze shifts made by bilingual versus monolingual infants when viewing videos in which speakers spoke in an unfamiliar (Armenian) versus familiar (English) language. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.