Language familiarity influences own‐race face recognition in 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants

Abstract

During their first year, infants attune to the faces and language(s) that are frequent in their environment. The present study investigates the impact of language familiarity on how French-learning 9-and 12-month-olds recognize own-race faces. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with the talking face of a Caucasian bilingual German-French speaker reciting a nursery rhyme in French (native condition) or in German (non-native condition). In the test phase, infants' face recognition was tested by presenting a picture of the speaker's face they were familiarized with, side by side with a novel face. At 9 and 12 months, neither infants in the native condition nor the ones in the non-native condition clearly recognized the speaker's face.In Experiment 2, we familiarized infants with the still picture of the speaker's face, along with the auditory speech stream. This time, both 9-and 12-month-olds recognized the face of the speaker they had been familiarized with, but only if she spoke in their native language. This study shows that at least from 9 months of age, language modulates the way faces are recognized.

Can language modulate perceptual narrowing for faces? Other-race face recognition in infants is modulated by language experience

“…These findings are particularly striking, because it is now wellestablished that other-race faces presented without language or other associated stimuli are not recognized by infants of these ages, due to perceptual narrowing (Kelly et al, 2007(Kelly et al, , 2009. In a previous study, we found that an own-race face recognition is tampered/ hindered when the face is associated with a non-native language (de Boisferon et al, 2021). The present results are in contradiction with the LFE, since associating a familiar native language with other-race faces did not improve their recognition.…”

“…Our main finding is that other-race faces can still be recognized by 9-and 12-month olds when associated with a non-native language. This finding challenges the conception of ORE during infancy, showing that multimodal presentation of the other-race face, as long as it does not violate infants' prior, can help overcoming the ORE. Alternatively, previous studies (de Boisferon et al, 2021;Minar & Lewkowicz, 2018) showed that any multimodal association considered as incongruent by the infants will impair face processing. It is thus possible that from 9 months of age, representations of social partners are multimodal, including language and faces.…”

“…The goal of the present study was to examine whether language familiarity (native or non-native) could also modulate the other-race effect in infancy. Previous LFE studies in infants and adults (Baus et al, 2017;de Boisferon et al, 2021) suggest that the native language has a beneficial role in own-race face recognition: Thus, presenting infants' native language together with other-race faces could also facilitate their learning and recognition. In line with this idea, language has been shown to act as a social categorizer: Non-native speakers are perceived and treated differently than native speakers by adults and children (Liberman et al, 2017(Liberman et al, , 2018.…”

“…Adults are indeed more efficient at recognizing talkers, represented by geometrical figures (Bregman & Creel, 2014;Kadam et al, 2016) or even real human own-race faces (Baus et al, 2017) when associated with their native language. Since language familiarity can modulate face recognition in adults, we recently examined whether there is a similar influence during infancy (de Boisferon et al, 2021). More precisely, we tested how learning of own-race faces by Caucasian French-learning 9-and 12-month-olds was affected by language familiarity (French native language vs. German non-native language).…”

“…Forgetting of the original stimulus is inferred when the fixation times for the familiar and the novel test stimuli are equal (Fantz, 1964;Fagan, 1972Fagan, , 1973Saayman et al, 1964). In de Boisferon et al (2021), we familiarized for 30-s 9-and 12month-old infants with a picture of a female Caucasian face. The picture of the face was associated with the soundtrack of a German-French bilingual speaker telling a story in infants' native language (French) for half of them or in a non-native language (German) for the other half.…”