Linguistic background affects bilingual children’s attention to the mouth of a talking person

Linguistic background affects bilingual children’s attention to the mouth of a talking person

Joan Birulés, Laura Bosch, and Ferran Pons

Universitat de Barcelona

A recent study indicates that Spanish-Catalan bilingual infants shift their attention to the mouth both earlier (4mo) and for a longer period of their development (12mo) than their monolingual counterparts (Pons et al., 2015). The current study explored whether the preference for the mouth in bilingual infants would extend to older ages (4-5 year-olds), and also whether this attention pattern could be associated to bilingualism by itself or rather associated only to closely-related languages bilingualism. For this purpose, we tested twenty 4- to 5-year-old Spanish-Catalan and Spanish-Russian bilingual children. They watched a female speaking Spanish (native) and English (L3) while we recorded eye-gaze with an eye tracker. Results revealed that groups differed in their eyes-mouth attention pattern, with the former group (Spanish-Catalan) showing a stronger preference for the mouth in both language conditions, a preference absent in the latter group (Spanish-Russian). Hence, we show that the mouth’s redundant speech cues continue to capture bilingual children’s attention, but only when they have been exposed to and have simultaneously acquired a pair of closely related languages, more constantly needing to be disambiguated. These results might have further implications in the way bilinguals are categorized, and on the effects that language proximity can have on their processing mechanisms.