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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Birulés Muntané, Joan, Bosch Galceran, Laura, Lewkowicz, David J., Pons Gimeno, Ferran
Format: article
Status:Versión aceptada para publicación
Publication Date:2024
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Barcelona
Repository:Dipòsit Digital de la UB
OAI Identifier:oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/220170
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2445/220170
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Infants
Percepció del llenguatge
Psicologia del desenvolupament
Lectura labial
Bilingüisme en els infants
Atenció
Children
Speech perception
Developmental psychology
Lipreading
Bilingualism in children
Attention
Description
Summary: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.