McFayden, T. , Wu, J. . & Panneton, R.
Virginia Tech
Infants' interest in and motivation toward social interactions are found to be positively related to emerging linguistic skill (e.g., joint attention and vocabulary size). It is not clear, however, whether the kind of attention control needed for good language learning is necessarily social in nature? To examine this, we tested 20 toddlers (16-17 mo) in an eye-tracking task where they heard and saw a female speaker in three conditions: Normal Upright (social), Filtered Inverted (semi-social), and Filtered Abstract (non-social). In each condition, infants free viewed the female speaker for 10 sec and were also presented with a 2-sec distractor at some random interval within each presentation. We analyzed scanning patterns and also relationships between scanning and other measures of linguistic skill (MCDI, Vineland, ASQ-Comm). Overall, we found little reliable evidence that infants' scanning of social events was related to language measures; however, we did find that attention to a non-social event was negatively predictive of linguistic skill. Although infants' scanning patterns of the two social presentations were interesting and consistent (e.g., a high degree of scanning on the mouth), this did not seem related to emerging language skill. Results will be discussed from a basic attention model.