Poster #4 - Can Language Influence the Visual Recognition of Abstract Patterns ?

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

As soon as their auditory system is functional, fetuses and infants hear their native language on a daily basis. At the end of their first year this daily exposure has made them expert to recognize and process their native.s language.s (Werker & Tees, 1984). However, little is known about the influence of such familiarity on how infants remember people and things around them. Previous studies have evidenced contextual effects on object and face recognition (Robinson & Pascalis, 2004; Jones et al., 2011), but only a few investigated the impact of language familiarity on infant recognition memory (Clerc et al., 2021; Hillairet de Boisferon et al.,2021). Infants often experience language and faces together, as they are exposed to talking faces everyday. As such, language familiarity may have a specific influence on face recognition. Hillairet de Boisferon et al. (2021) found own-race face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds when they were learned along their native language. However, it is hindered when the face is presented in association with a non-native language. Thus, language familiarity seems to influence how infant learn and recognize faces. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern recognition that are new to infants.
We tested 9- to 12-month-old French learning monolingual infants (N total=49) with a Visual Paired Comparison task, a paradigm classically used to study infant recognition memory (e.g., Robinson & Pascalis, 2004; Hillairet de Boisferon et al., 2021). During a 30s familiarization phase, infants were shown an image of abstract patterns associated with an auditory soundtrack of a speaker reciting a story either in their native (French, N = 21) or in a non-native language (German, N = 28). Immediately after the familiarization, the familiar and a new abstract pattern were displayed side-by-side for the recognition test. We found a significant preference for the novel object in the native language condition (t(20) = 2.67, p < .05. but not in the non-native condition (t < 1). These results suggest that language familiarity effects on infant memory are not specific to faces but also influences on a larger scale how infant process their immediate visual environment.

Authors

• Althéa Fratacci, Université Grenoble Alpes
  Presenting Author

• Olivier Clerc

• Mathilde Fort, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

• Olivier Pascalis, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)