Time Course of Attention to a Talker’s Mouth in Monolingual and Close-Language Bilingual Children

Abstract

We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan-Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children’s native and a non-native language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker’s eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children’s native language, monolinguals attended equally to the eyes and mouth throughout the trial whereas close-language bilinguals first attended more to the mouth and then distributed attention equally between the eyes and mouth. In contrast, when the talker spoke in a non-native language (English), both monolinguals and bilinguals initially attended more to the mouth and then gradually shifted to a pattern of equal attention to the eyes and mouth. These results indicate that specific early linguistic experience has differential effects on young children’s deployment of selective attention to areas of a talker’s face during the initial part of an audiovisual utterance.