Pejovic, J. 1 , Yee, E. 2 & Molnar, M. . 1
1 BCBL. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
2 Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut
When processing some types of audiovisual speech, bilingual infants attend to the mouth at an earlier age than monolinguals (Pons, Bosh & Lewkowicz, 2015). Specifically, this difference, was observed when infants were presented with continuous audiovisual speech in their dominant language, and could reflect that bilinguals attend more to redundant cues (the speaker's mouth). However, it is unknown whether bilinguals exhibit the same pattern when processing simple stimuli, common to their two languages.
Here, Spanish and Basque monolingual and bilingual infants were presented with audiovisual videos of vowel stimuli that are shared across Spanish and Basque. Forty 4-month-olds (twenty monolinguals) and thirty-eight 8-month-olds (twenty monolinguals) were presented with three audiovisual trials of repeated pronunciation of /i/ and three of /u/. Measuring infants' looks to the eyes and mouth regions revealed a shift from attending more to the eyes at 4-months, to attending to both the eyes and mouth at 8-months (aligned with Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012;Pons et al., 2015). However, the language groups did not differ in this pattern. Our results complement the previous findings (Pons et al., 2015) by suggesting that when processing simpler linguistic stimuli, shared across the groups, bilingualism does not modulate infants' audiovisual speech processing.