Impact of early bilingualism on infants? exploration of faces producing speech and non-speech gestures

Fort, M. , Burgaleta, M. & Sebastian-Galles, N.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Center for Brain and Cognition

As opposed to adults, infants from 8 to 18 months prefer looking at the mouth over the eyes region of a face talking in their native language (Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012, Fort et al., 2015). This preference, even stronger in bilingual infants, is often interpreted as infants? ability rely on the audiovisual redundant cues provided by the mouth area of talking faces to acquire their native(s) language(s) (Pons, et al., 2015). In a previous study we showed that 12-month old monolinguals and 15-months-old bilinguals? preference for the mouth area of a speaker prevent them from anticipating subsequent non-speech gestures displayed in her eyes region (Fort et al., in preparation). Here, we reanalyzed these results and showed that, independent of their age and their average preference for the mouth area, bilinguals were overall more inconsistent than monolinguals in their eyes-mouth preference when exploring non-speech gestures. Furthermore, bilinguals also displayed greater inconsistency when exploring speech movements after being exposed to non-speech gestures in the eyes region. These results suggest that non-speech gestures meant to draw attention away from the mouth region may affect bilinguals? exploration of talking faces, potentially disrupting their ability to gather audiovisual redundant information from the mouth region.