Nancy Ward – nancyward@ucla.edu
Megha Sundara – megha.sundara@humnet.ucla.edu
UCLA
3125 Campbell Hall, Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1543
Popular version of paper 5aSCa1
Presented Monday morning, November 4, 2011
162nd ASA Meeting, San Diego, California.
The talking face is a very important part of language input to infants. We often ignore it as irrelevant, because we are able to communicate very effectively when we can’t see a person’s face, such as over the telephone. However, visual cues are very important to the overall communicative experience, and can help us, particularly in noisy environments. Previous research shows that within the first year of life, infants are sensitive to these visual cues - they can match a voice and a face, or to match a spoken sound with one that they see.
In fact, 4-month-old infants are able to tell the difference between talking faces speaking different languages just from these visual cues, with no sound (Weikum et al. 2007). We have shown recently that infants can not only tell the difference between two languages visually, but they prefer to look at a face speaking their native language (Ward & Sundara, 2010). Specifically, we showed monolingual English learning, and bilingual English and Spanish learning infants videos of the same bilingual speaker speaking in English and Spanish. Monolingual English-learning infants looked significantly more often to the videos of the person speaking English, showing that they could tell which language was the one they were learning and they adjusted their looking behavior accordingly. Bilingual infants, who were familiar with both languages did not show a preference. (See Video 1 to test if you can tell the difference.)
Video 1. Sample of English/Spanish stimuli.*
In our current work to be presented at the ASA meeting in San Diego, we follow up this study to determine how infants can tell the difference between languages. What cues are in a talking face that infants are not only paying attention to, but that they are able to use to discriminate talking faces to pick out their native language? In particular, are their abilities guided by what they know about the timing of speech, which contributes to the overall rhythm of the language? Previous research shows that infants can distinguish languages auditorily using speech rhythm cues. Or do they just know something about the facial movements that correspond with sounds in their native language (such as how the lips, tongue, and jaw move)?
To address this question, we tested whether 4-month-old infants prefer to look at a language that is similar rhythmically to English, namely Dutch, over a language that is rhythmically different from English, Spanish. We showed English-learning infants side-by-side videos of a Dutch/Spanish bilingual speaker talking in each language (See Video 2 for an example). We tested which videos infants paid more attention to: the ones that were more like English rhythmically, the Dutch videos, or the ones that were less like English rhythmically, the Spanish videos. Preliminary results show that the infants show a trend towards looking longer at the face speaking Dutch over the one speaking Spanish. The trend was not statistically significant, but could indicate that the rhythm of the speech is one of the cues that help infants determine their language visually. However, rhythm alone is not enough to draw a looking preference from the infant. The results of this study lead us to believe that the language-specific facial shapes (corresponding with the sounds of a language) most likely play at least a part in infant recognition of the visual speech of their language.
Video 2. Sample of Dutch/Spanish stimuli.*
References
Ward, N. &Sundara, M. (2010). Development of native language preference in the visual modality.Poster presented at 2nd Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics, Cancun.
Weikum, W. M., Vouloumanos, A., Navarra, J., Soto-Faraco, S., Sebastián-Gallés, N., &Werker, J. F. (2007).Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy.Science, 316, 1159.
*English was on the left in the first video, and Spanish was on the left in the second video.