The role of talking faces in infant language learning: Mind the gap between screen-based settings and real-life communicative interactions

Abstract

In 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 the evidence from these screen-based studies with another line of research that has studied how infants learn novel words and deploy their attention during naturalistic play. In our view, this is an important step to develop an integrated account on infants’ effective use of talkers’ faces during early language learning. We then 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) towards talking faces: social contingency, speaker characteristics and task- dependencies. Last, we propose ideas to address these issues in future research, with the aim to reduce the existing gap between current experimental studies and how infants effectively use and rely upon talking faces in their real-life language environment.

Leader-follower dynamics during early social interactions matter for infant word learning

“…Adults gaze-shifts were mostly reactive, with the adult following the infants' interest 59% (SD = 9) of the time (adult-follower>mutual condition: N = 126.8, SD = 46.2). Finally, the frequency with which infants looked towards their caregivers' face while they were looking towards an object was relatively low (adult-leader>partner: M = 8%, SD = 6; N = 18.6, SD = 12.8), highly significantly lower than for caregivers (infant-leader>partner: beta = 30,3%, se = 0,9, t = 32, p < 0.001), a pattern that has been reported in other studies examining free-flowing play interactions 9,18,19 . Infants were also slower to join their partner's focus of attention: infants took on average 1.3 (SD = 0.35) seconds to join an adult-led episode of mutual attention, while adults' latency to join an infant-led episode of mutual attention was 0.81 (SD = 0.24) seconds (t(37) = 6.99, p < 0.001).…”

“…Most of them had a degree (22), 13 were post-graduate, 2 had no formal education, and 1 had a PhD. They worked full time (12), part-time (18), were unemployed (6), or still studying (2). Three of them were single mothers.…”