Mousley Victoria L, MacSweeney Mairéad, Mercure Evelyne
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Biling (Camb Engl). 2023 Aug;26(4):835-844. doi: 10.1017/S136672892200092X. Epub 2023 Jan 20.
Bilingual infants rely differently than monolinguals on facial information, such as lip patterns, to differentiate their native languages. This may explain, at least in part, why young monolinguals and bilinguals show differences in social attention. For example, in the first year, bilinguals attend faster and more often to static faces over non-faces than do monolinguals (Mercure et al., 2018). However, the developmental trajectories of these differences are unknown. In this pre-registered study, data were collected from 15- to 18-month-old monolinguals (English) and bilinguals (English and another language) to test whether group differences in face-looking behaviour persist into the second year. We predicted that bilinguals would orient more rapidly and more often to static faces than monolinguals. Results supported the first but not the second hypothesis. This suggests that, even into the second year of life, toddlers' rapid visual orientation to static social stimuli is sensitive to early language experience.
双语婴儿在区分母语时，对面部信息（如嘴唇动作模式）的依赖方式与单语婴儿不同。这至少可以部分解释为什么年幼的单语者和双语者在社会注意力方面存在差异。例如，在第一年，与单语婴儿相比，双语婴儿更快且更频繁地关注静态面孔而非非面孔（Mercure等人，2018年）。然而，这些差异的发展轨迹尚不清楚。在这项预先注册的研究中，收集了15至18个月大的单语者（英语）和双语者（英语和另一种语言）的数据，以测试面部注视行为的群体差异是否持续到第二年。我们预测，与单语者相比，双语者会更快且更频繁地转向静态面孔。结果支持了第一个假设，但不支持第二个假设。这表明，即使到了生命的第二年，幼儿对静态社会刺激的快速视觉定向仍对早期语言经验敏感。
