The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-lab study

Abstract

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously attend to what other people attend to, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolinguals, and do not always have access to the same word learning heuristics (e.g., mutual exclusivity). In a pre-registered study, we tested the hypothesis that bilingual experience would lead to a more pronounced ability to follow another’s gaze. We used the gaze-following paradigm developed by Senju & Csibra (2008) to test a total of 93 6–9 month-old and 229 12–15 month-old monolingual and bilingual infants, in 11 labs located in 8 countries. Monolingual and bilingual infants showed similar gaze-following abilities, and both groups showed age-related improvements in speed, accuracy, frequency and duration of fixations to congruent objects. Unexpectedly, bilinguals tended to make more frequent fixations to onscreen objects, whether or not they were cued by the actor. These results suggest that gaze sensitivity is a fundamental aspect of development that is robust to variation in language exposure.

Bilingualism affects infant cognition: Insights from new and open data

“…We hope that future researchers also benefit from the datasets we have generated and shared. In an Open Science spirit, further large-scale, pre-registered experimentation with infants from a range of ages, cultures, languages, and using standardized stimuli and analytic approaches could also be performed (e.g., ManyBabies Consortium, 2020; Byers-Heinlein, Tsui, van Renswoude et al, 2020;Byers-Heinlein, Tsui, Bergmann, et al, 2020). This approach could help to better understand experimental-level moderators that might affect performance during data collection (e.g., different sets of stimuli, experimental design) and infant-level moderators that might affect learning and cognition over development (e.g., different types of bilingual experiences).…”

The Language Development Process of Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Investigation into Gender Linguistic Differences

“…Therefore, studies prove that children in monolingual and bilingual environments have completely different outcomes when it comes to acquiring grammatical structure, speech, and words whereas other studies believe that language development takes place independent of the type of environment the child is raised in. (Byers-Heinlein et al, 2020). When it comes to autism, various studies support the claim that a bilingual environment is more advantageous for children in boosting their communicative and cognitive domains (Poarch et al, 2012;Kroll & Bialystok, 2013).…”

Challenges of infant language acquisition in bilingual environments

“…researchers can agree on a common definition of bilingualism, and test infants from a variety of bilingual backgrounds using identical stimuli and a common protocol (see also Byers-Heinlein, Tsui, Black, et al, 2020), for a second example of a large-scale collaboration testing bilingual infants). While research questions for initial large-scale collaborations were chosen for reasons of feasibility, future studies can investigate questions that are more central to infant bilingualism researchers, such as how performance in a language task varies according to language pair or amount of input.…”