Pons, F. 1 , Bosch, L. 1 & Lewkowicz, D. 2
1 Universitat de Barcelona
2 Florida Atlantic University
Previous research has shown a shift in attention from the eyes to the mouth of a talking face between 4 and 8 months of age (Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012). Shifting attention to the mouth is correlated with the onset of babbling and it provides 8-month-old infants with direct access to the redundant audiovisual speech cues that can enhance the acquisition of native speech forms. At 12 months attention begins to shift back to the eyes permitting them to access the social cues that are critical in cognitive and communicative development. Compared to monolinguals, infants growing up in bilingual environments may begin to exploit audiovisual speech information earlier in development and also may rely on these cues later into development to help them keep their two language systems separate. Here, we explored whether the developmental trajectory of attentional shifting is also present in bilingual infants. We tested 4-, 8- and 12-month-old bilingual (N=20 per age) and monolingual (N=20 per age) infants. Infants watched a female speaking either in their native or non-native language while we recorded eye-gaze with a Tobii eye tracker. Results showed that 4-month-old monolinguals spent more time looking at the eyes regardless of language but that 4-month-old bilinguals looked less at the eyes and more at the mouth. At 8 months of age, both monolingual and bilingual infants spent more time looking at the mouth. At 12 months, bilingual infants spent more time looking at the mouth in both languages, while monolingual infants only showed this pattern for non-native language. These results reveal a different selective attention pattern in bilinguals. These findings suggest that mouth and lip information provide important speech cues that bilingual infants also use for other purposes than just learning speech sounds.