Bilingual toddlers show increased attention capture by static faces compared to monolinguals

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Mousley, Victoria L; MacSweeney, Mairéad and Mercure, Evelyne. 2023. Bilingual toddlers show increased attention capture by static faces compared to monolinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 26(4), pp. 835-844. ISSN 1366-7289 [Article]

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672892200092X

Abstract or Description

Bilingual infants rely differently than monolinguals on facial information, such as lip patterns, to differentiate their native languages. This may explain, at least in part, why young monolinguals and bilinguals show differences in social attention. For example, in the first year, bilinguals attend faster and more often to static faces over non-faces than do monolinguals (Mercure et al., 2018). However, the developmental trajectories of these differences are unknown. In this pre-registered study, data were collected from 15- to 18-month-old monolinguals (English) and bilinguals (English and another language) to test whether group differences in face-looking behaviour persist into the second year. We predicted that bilinguals would orient more rapidly and more often to static faces than monolinguals. Results supported the first but not the second hypothesis. This suggests that, even into the second year of life, toddlers’ rapid visual orientation to static social stimuli is sensitive to early language experience.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672892200092X

Additional Information:

Funding statement: This work was supported in part by the Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship awarded to M.M. [100229/Z/12/Z]. V.L.M was supported by a Graduate Research Scholarship and an Overseas Research Scholarship from University College London.

Data Access Statement:

The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to the highly sensitive nature of children's private data but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates: