Poster #1 - Attention Allocation and Gaze Behaviors of Infants Raised in Monolingual and English-Spanish Bilingual Households

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Language environments, monolingual vs. bilingual, have been shown to influence how infants attend to social cues (Ayneto & Sebastian-Galles, 2017). Studies using eye-tracking paradigms documented that infants from bilingual households had advanced attention shifting (Comishen et al., 2019) and more frequent fixations to on-screen targets (Byers-Heinlein et al., 2021) when compared to their monolingual peers. However, a recent observational study of naturalistic parent-child play by head-mounted eye-trackers suggests that infants from bilingual households have comparable multimodal visual experiences as monolinguals (Sun et al., 2022). The mixed results may be due to a scarcity of research investigating infants’ free viewing in regard to their language environments. To address the unresolved question, the present study aims to (1) characterize attention behaviors of young children raised in monolingual and English-Spanish bilingual households and (2) investigate the potential effects of early dual-language exposure in shaping attention behaviors during parent-child object play.

A sample of 17 monolingual and 18 English-Spanish bilingual parents with infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months (monolingual =12.0 (SD: 3.9), bilingual =10.9 (SD: 2.6), 18 males in total) participated in the study. Parents were instructed to play with their children using a box of toys during a five-minute interactive play session. Head-mounted eye-tracking systems were worn by both parents and infants to record their momentary attention allocations during the play session. Data collection has been completed, and we are currently processing the gaze data and annotating moment-to-moment attention bits into four regions of interest: (1) target objects, (2) own’s hands, (3) partner’s hands, and (4) partner’s face. We plan to characterize the attention distribution of both monolingual and bilingual groups into three types of gaze: (1) saccades (less than 200 milliseconds [ms]), (2) fixations (200-2000 ms), and (3) sustained attention (more than 2000 ms) that differentially support information processes (Hessels et al., 2018; Yu et al., 2017).

We plan to use general linear models to investigate group differences and the effect of gaze types on children’s attention distribution. In specific, we expect to observe the comparable duration of attention on target objects, while bilingual children have more saccades and fixations as they develop advanced flexibility skills to visual cues. The present study will provide novel information on the effect of a bilingual language learning environment on young children’s gaze distribution and will further discuss processes of how a language learning environment may influence everyday attention and its association with language development.

Authors

• Sara Paredes Raquel, University of Houston
  Presenting Author

• Lichao Sun, University of Houston

• Hanako Yoshida, University of Houston