Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy

Weikum, Whitney; Vouloumanos, Athena; Navarra, Jordi; Soto‐Faraco, Salvador; Sebastián‐Gallés, Núria; Werker, Janet F.

doi:10.1126/science.1137686

Cited by 325 publications

(321 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Visual language discrimination. The visual speech stimuli were the same as those used by Weikum et al (27). The faces of three bilingual (French/English) speakers were filmed while they recited sentences in both French and English.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Young infants visually tell apart English and French at 4 and 6 mo of age, but fail at 8 mo unless they are raised bilingual (27,29 We tested infants at 6 mo of age, before they typically experience a decline in sensitivity to nonnative language information, and again at 10 mo, by which time typically developing infants show a decline in performance on each task. We compared three groups of infants at each age: SRI-exposed infants whose depressed mothers had been prescribed SRI medications during pregnancy, depressed-only infants whose mothers had depressive symptoms but chose not to take medication, and control infants whose mothers did not meet our criteria for depression or take psychotropic medications during pregnancy.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To provide a sensitive assay in humans, we tested infants on two perceptual tasks that have been extensively studied: (i) auditory discrimination of a nonnative consonant speech sound contrast (26) and (ii) visual discrimination of the change from one language to another while watching silent talking faces (27).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Weikum

Oberlander

Hensch

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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168

103

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Language acquisition reflects a complex interplay between biology and early experience. Psychotropic medication exposure has been shown to alter neural plasticity and shift sensitive periods in perceptual development. Notably, serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) are antidepressant agents increasingly prescribed to manage antenatal mood disorders, and depressed maternal mood per se during pregnancy impacts infant behavior, also raising concerns about long-term consequences following such developmental exposure. We studied whether infants' language development is altered by prenatal exposure to SRIs and whether such effects differ from exposure to maternal mood disturbances. Infants from non-SRI-treated mothers with little or no depression (control), depressed but non-SRI-treated (depressed-only), and depressed and treated with an SRI (SRI-exposed) were studied at 36 wk gestation (while still in utero) on a consonant and vowel discrimination task and at 6 and 10 mo of age on a nonnative speech and visual language discrimination task. Whereas the control infants responded as expected (success at 6 mo and failure at 10 mo) the SRI-exposed infants failed to discriminate the language differences at either age and the depressed-only infants succeeded at 10 mo instead of 6 mo. Fetuses at 36 wk gestation in the control condition performed as expected, with a response on vowel but not consonant discrimination, whereas the SRI-exposed fetuses showed accelerated perceptual development by discriminating both vowels and consonants. Thus, prenatal depressed maternal mood and SRI exposure were found to shift developmental milestones bidirectionally on infant speech perception tasks.L anguage, our most quintessential human characteristic, involves a complex interplay between biology and experience. At birth, infants possess an initial preparedness for language and a developmental readiness that supports learning any of the world's languages (1-3), yet also already show privileged processing to the native language from prenatal listening experience (4-6). During the following weeks and months of life, infants become progressively attuned to the properties of their native language, including its rhythmical and segmental (e.g., consonant) information (reviewed in refs. 7 and 8). The high degree of regularity in the timing of sequential tuning to properties of the native language suggests a series of critical or sensitive periods, i.e., points in development when the system is maximally influenced by input.The timing of onset of these sensitive periods seems to be maturationally constrained. Infants born 3 mo preterm attune to the phonetic properties (9) of their native language at the same gestational age as full-term infants, not according to the number of months of postnatal listening experience. Such maturational constraints can protect development: ensuring the optimal consecutive stabilization of the perceptual components that contribute in a step-wise fashion to language acquisition (10). However, it is known from research i...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Weikum

Oberlander

Hensch

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

168

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Visual speech has often been regarded as a redundant signal in verbal communication (Weikum et al, 2007). But although it has been shown that children can discriminate languages both auditorily (Bosch & Sebastian-Galles, 1997; Mehler et al, 1988) and visually (Weikum et al, 2007), the ability to integrate both auditory and visual information may play a more crucial role in early language development than previously thought (Weikum et al, 2007;Yeung & Werker, 2013). It is frequently reported that children and adults with neurodevelopmental disorders present with language delay, even when their subsequent language is relatively proficient, as is the case for Williams syndrome (Paterson, Brown, Gsodl, Johnson, & KarmiloffSmith, 1999).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Audio-visual speech perception in infants and toddlers with Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and Williams syndrome

D’Souza

Johnson

et al. 2016

Infant Behavior and Development

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“…The role of attentional processes in bilinguals' enhanced performance in EF tasks is highlighted by studies with bilingual-to-be infants, who show a greater ability to switch responses in visual-orientation tasks than infants exposed to a single language (Weikum et al, 2007;Kovács & Mehler, 2009a, 2009bSebastián-Gallés et al, 2012). Infants as young as 4 months are able to discriminate between two similar languages (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés 1997, 2001, and Kovács (2012) argues that these early discriminatory abilities suggest that bilingual-to-be infants start switching attention between the languages they are exposed to well before they acquire these languages and must start code switching in their language production.…”

Section: Bringing Together Bilinguals' Better Performance In Fb and Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

Rubio-Fernández

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the SallyAnne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals' better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the falsebelief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals' better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals' performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

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Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy

Cited by 325 publications

References 8 publications

Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Audio-visual speech perception in infants and toddlers with Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and Williams syndrome

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

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