Development of infants’ preferential looking toward native language speakers across distinct social contexts.

Abstract

Presenting pictures of faces side by side is a common paradigm to assess infants’ attentional biases according to social categories, such as gender, race, and language. However, seeing static faces does not represent infants’ typical experience of the social world, which involves people in motion and performing actions. Here, we assessed infants’ looking preferences for native over foreign language speakers in two social contexts: the presentation of static faces and the presentation of people performing instrumental actions. In addition, we tested infants’ preferential looking at 5 and 9 months of age to assess whether their pattern of preferential looking changes across development. The results of 5-month-old infants replicated and extended previous findings by showing that, at this age, infants typically look longer at people who previously spoke their native language. As found for other social categories such as race and gender, this familiarity-based looking preference was not evident at 9 months of age when infants were presented with static faces. However, when presented with more informative dynamic events, 9-month-old infants showed a temporally aligned preference for the native over the foreign language speaker. Specifically, infants’ looking preference was time-locked to the completion of the action goal: when speakers grasped and lifted a toy. These results suggest potentially a familiarity-based preference toward native language speakers around 5 months of age, which may later develop into a more strategic selective response in service of information-seeking.

Who spoke that language? Assessing early face-language associations in monolingual and bilingual infants

“…Based on the previously mentioned studies, 4- and 6-month-old monolinguals were expected to show a preference for the native language speaker. This preference was also expected to disappear by 10 months of age, as previously reported by Colomer et al (2023) . Crucially, no study to date has explored bilingual infants’ preference for speakers using one or the other of their languages.…”

“…Five- to six-month-old monolingual infants showed a visual preference for the speaker that had previously spoken in their native language. A recent study by Colomer et al (2023) replicated and extended those findings. They found that the preference for speakers of the native language is present even earlier, in 3- to 6-month-old monolingual infants.…”

“…They found that the preference for speakers of the native language is present even earlier, in 3- to 6-month-old monolingual infants. However, this preference seems to disappear later in life, as 8- to 11-month-old infants no longer preferred looking at the native language speaker ( Colomer et al, 2023 ). Similar developmental patterns have been observed when exploring visual preferences for other speaker characteristics, such as gender ( Quinn et al, 2002 ; Liu et al, 2015a ) and race ( Liu et al, 2015b ; Fassbender et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Although the studies by Kinzler et al (2007) and Colomer et al (2023) focus on how language influences speaker perception and infants’ social cognition, they provide evidence of early face-language associations. As there is no pre-existing relationship between the physical appearance of a speaker and the language they use, infants must have formed some type of association between the auditory aspects of the language and the face of the speaker in order to express a language-based visual preference.…”

“…In the Silent test trial, infants were presented with side-by-side static pictures of the speakers with no sound. The aim was to assess primary face-language associations by measuring infants’ visual preference for the speakers depending on the language they had previously used, as in Colomer et al (2023) and Kinzler et al (2007) . If infants’ looking behavior is influenced by the language used by the speakers, then they must have established some form of association between the languages and the physical appearance of the speakers.…”