Word learning in monolingual and bilingual children: The influence of speaker eye-gaze

Abstract

The current study examined the impact of a speaker's gaze on novel-word learning in 4-5-year old monolingual (N = 23) and bilingual children (N = 24). Children were taught novel words when the speaker looked at the object both times while labeling it (consistent) and when the speaker looked at the object only the first time (inconsistent). During teaching, bilingual children differentiated between the target object (that matched the label) and non-target object (that did not match the label) earlier than the monolingual children on trials without eye-gaze information. However, during testing, monolingual children showed more robust retention of novel words than bilingual children in both conditions. Findings suggest that bilingualism shapes children's attention to eye-gaze during word learning, but that, ultimately, there is no bilingual advantage for utilizing this cue in the service of word retention.

Keywords: eye-tracking; social-pragmatic; speaker eye-gaze; word learning.

Fig. 1.

Novel word-novel object pairings. Object-word pairings in each list were balanced such that “dep” was paired with each type of novel object in List 1.

Fig. 2.

Example of a teaching trial. Children were taught 3 new labels in each condition (See Figure 1 for stimuli list). Presentation of conditions was counterbalanced across children and object-word pairings were counterbalanced across conditions. In the Inconsistent condition, teaching trials with gaze were always presented first, followed by no-gaze trials.

Fig. 3.

Time course (500–2600ms) of the proportion of looks to target from word onset for each condition across all children. Solid lines represent raw observed means and surrounding ribbons represent standard errors. Dashed horizontal lines mark chance performance (0.50).

Fig. 4.

Time course (500–2600ms) of the proportion of looks to target from word onset for each group across both conditions. Solid lines represent raw observed means and surrounding ribbons represent standard errors. Dashed horizontal lines mark chance performance (0.50).