The Role of Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning: Mind the Gap between Screen-Based Settings and Real-Life Communicative Interactions

Abstract

Over the last few decades, developmental (psycho) linguists have demonstrated that perceiving talking faces audio-visually is important for early language acquisition. Using mostly well-controlled and screen-based laboratory approaches, this line of research has shown that paying attention to talking faces is likely to be one of the powerful strategies infants use to learn their native(s) language(s). In this review, we combine evidence from these screen-based studies with another line of research that has studied how infants learn novel words and deploy their visual attention during naturalistic play. In our view, this is an important step toward developing an integrated account of how infants effectively extract audiovisual information from talkers’ faces during early language learning. We identify three factors that have been understudied so far, despite the fact that they are likely to have an important impact on how infants deploy their attention (or not) toward talking faces during social interactions: social contingency, speaker characteristics, and task- dependencies. Last, we propose ideas to address these issues in future research, with the aim of reducing the existing knowledge gap between current experimental studies and the many ways infants can and do effectively rely upon the audiovisual information extracted from talking faces in their real-life language environment.

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

“…A potential limitation of the current study is the use of a controlled, in-lab experimental task that does not fully replicate the natural situations in which infants interact with new speakers (see Birulés et al, 2023 ). While this approach is highly valuable for exploring the potential underlying mechanisms in face-language associations, future research could enhance ecological validity by designing experimental tasks that more closely mirror real-world interactions.…”

Advances in Understanding the Phenomena and Processing in Audiovisual Speech Perception

“…The early development of infant language learning in the context of multisensory processing is addressed in the review by Birulés, Goupil, Josse and Fort [ 2 ]. They first acknowledge that laboratory studies have provided a wealth of findings contributing to the knowledge of AV speech perception and processing in infants.…”