Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 169, Issue -, Pages 93-109Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.01.002
Keywords
Bilingualism; Language development; Selective attention; Face perception; Infant; Eye-tracking; Social attention
Funding
- National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [DGE-07074240707424]
- National Institutes of Health [R01 HD082844]
- EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT [F31HD090937, R01HD082844] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
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Infants increasingly attend to the mouths of others during the latter half of the first postnatal year, and individual differences in selective attention to talking mouths during infancy predict verbal skills during toddlerhood. There is some evidence suggesting that trajectories in mouth-looking vary by early language environment, in particular monolingual or bilingual language exposure, which may have differential consequences in developing sensitivity to the communicative and social affordances of the face. Here, we evaluated whether 6- to 12-month-olds' mouth-looking is related to skills associated with concurrent social communicative development including early language functioning and emotion discriminability. We found that attention to the mouth of a talking face increased with age but that mouth-looking was more strongly associated with concurrent expressive language skills than chronological age for both monolingual and bilingual infants. Mouth-looking was not related to emotion discrimination. These data suggest that selective attention to a talking mouth may be one important mechanism by which infants learn language regardless of home language environment. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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