Infanti, R. 1, 2 , Guellai, B. 1 , Parlato, E. 2 & Gratier, M. 1
1 Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
2 Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
In the first 6 months of life infants are drawn to social stimuli. It is known that infants are highly motivated to engage with social partner who spoke to them in their native language than in a foreign language. However, until today few studies are showing infants' communication from a multimodal and embodied perspective. The aim of the present study was to determine whether 5-month-old infants would seek to engage more with a speaker of their native language than with a speaker of a foreign language from a global perspective of infants' behaviors: looking time, facial expressions, body movement and vocalizations during the speech and gaps. Twenty 5-month-old French infants were presented with audiovisual recordings of 2 speakers talking to them with infant-directed intonation and frequent pauses, one talked in French and the other in Portuguese. Results on the one hand confirmed findings of previous studies in terms of visual preference but do not clearly indicate any differences in communicative behavior towards the speakers. This study is the first to show the influence of the infants' whole body in the perception of their native language.
Keywords: integrated communication, native and foreign languages, infants