The influence of bilingualism on the preference for the mouth region of dynamic faces

Abstract

Bilingual infants show an extended period of looking at the mouth of talking faces, which provides them with additional articulatory cues that can be used to boost the challenging situation of learning two languages (Pons, Bosch & Lewkowicz, 2015). However, the eye region also provides fundamental cues for emotion perception and recognition, as well as communication. Here, we explored whether the adaptations resulting from learning two languages are specific to linguistic content or if they also influence the focus of attention when looking at dynamic faces. We recorded the eye gaze of bilingual and monolingual infants (8- and 12-month-olds) while watching videos of infants and adults portraying different emotional states (neutral, crying, and laughing). When looking at infant faces, bilinguals looked longer at the mouth region as compared to monolinguals regardless of age. However, when presented with adult faces, 8-month-old bilingual infants looked longer at the mouth region and less at the eye region compared to 8-month-old monolingual infants, but no effect of language exposure was found at 12 months of age. These findings suggest that the bias to the mouth region in bilingual infants at 8 months of age can be generalized to other audiovisual dynamic faces that do not contain linguistic information. We discuss the potential implications of such bias in early social and communicative development.

Impact of Bilingualism on Infants’ Ability to Learn From Talking and Nontalking Faces

“…At 4 and 12 months of age, infants growing up in a bilingual environment pay more attention to the mouth region than their monolingual peers (Pons, Bosch, & Lewkowicz, ). The same pattern of results is observed at 8 months when presenting bilingual and monolingual infants with nontalking communicative faces (Ayneto & Sebastian‐Galles, ). Taking into account that in daily face‐to‐face situations, communicative faces usually speak, both of these results suggest that bilingual infants might have developed this increased preference for the mouth region of communicative faces as an adaptive mechanism to overcome the challenge of learning two languages at the same time (for reviews, see Costa & Sebastián‐Gallés, ; Werker, ).…”

“…Previous findings by Pons et al. () and Ayneto‐Gimeno & Sebastian‐Galles () have shown that during their first year of life, bilingual infants look more at the mouth region of talking and nontalking faces than their monolingual peers. Here we found the same pattern of results at a later stage of development but we also went one step further: We showed that during their second year of life (15 months of age), bilingual infants kept looking at the mouth region of the speaker rather than disengaging from it, preventing them from anticipating the appearance of additional information coming from the eyes region (EB movement).…”

“…Thus, it may well be possible that the increased preference for the mouth region of dynamic faces observed for bilingual infants by Pons et al. () and Ayneto and Sebastian‐Galles () have helped them to focus on the relevant articulatory information to discriminate beween languages in Weikum et al () and Sebastian‐Galles et al. ().…”

The bilingual adaptation: How minds accommodate experience.

“…Mouth movement provides more relevant linguistic information than does information from the eyes, and in the first year, infants raised with more than one language attend to the more informative source. A recent study by Ayneto and Sebastian-Galles (in press) showed that this bias for focusing on the mouth by bilingual children extends beyond linguistic information and also characterized attention to adult faces displaying emotional states; 8-month old bilingual infants focused on the mouth more than monolingual infants but by 12 months this difference was no longer found.…”

The impact of bilingual environments on selective attention in infancy

“…Toward the latter half of the first year, infants begin to attend more to the mouth than to the eyes (Tenenbaum, Shah, Sobel, Malle, & Morgan, 2013). A recent study by Tsang, Atagi, and Johnson (2018) confirmed a relation between attention to talking mouths and increasing verbal skills for both monolingual and bilingual infants between 6 and 12 months old, but the shift of attention from the eyes to the mouth was found earlier for infants exposed to bilingual environments than for those in monolingual environments (Ayneto & Sebastián-Gallés, 2017). A recent study by Tsang, Atagi, and Johnson (2018) confirmed a relation between attention to talking mouths and increasing verbal skills for both monolingual and bilingual infants between 6 and 12 months old, but the shift of attention from the eyes to the mouth was found earlier for infants exposed to bilingual environments than for those in monolingual environments (Ayneto & Sebastián-Gallés, 2017).…”