Effects of Bilingualism and Language Familiarity on Infants’ Gaze Following of Same- and Other-Race Faces.

• In Event: Cognition and Bias

Abstract

During the first year of life infants are primarily exposed to same-race faces (Sugden, et al., 2014). This asymmetrical experience leads to the other-race effect (ORE), a well-known phenomenon characterized by poorer discrimination ability for faces from other ethnicities compared to faces from one’s own ethnicity (for a review see Meissner & Brigham, 2001). The ORE can also influence social gaze following. For instance, 7 month-old infants have been shown to follow an adult’s gaze in situations of uncertainty only if they were from the same-race category (Xiao et al., 2018). However this asymmetry has been shown to be absent in infants who were raised in bilingual households. While 18-month old monolingual infants followed own- over other-race faces’ gaze direction, bilingual 18-month old infants did not show a race-preference (Singh et al., 2019).

The goal of our study is to test the extent to which infants might show such biases in gaze following when stimulus faces are combined with native and non-native speech. We adapted the approach of the above mentioned studies (Xiao et al., 2018; Singh et al., 2019), and tested German children raised in either monolingual or bilingual households on their gaze following of same-race European and other-race Asian and African faces presented in video form speaking either German (native) or French (non-native) infant-directed phrases.

We tested 6-month-old and 12-month-old infants in order to look for differences in gaze following both before and after the onset of the ORE. Typically, 6-month-olds do not yet show the ORE, while numerous studies have been able to show the ORE starting at approximately 9 months of age (Kelly et al., 2007; Kelly et al., 2009).

Infants viewed 16 familiarization trials where videos appeared at the center of the screen featuring either a female European, Asian, or African model who first speaks a phrase in either German or French directing the infants’ attention (English translation: “Hello baby, look!”), and then looks towards one of the four corners of the screen. In half of the trials an animated toy would then appear in that corner of the screen, while in the other half the toy would appear in one of the other 3 corners. Infants then saw 2 test trials where the central video was used again, but no toy appeared in any of the corners. See Figure 1 for an illustration of the stimulus screen.
In our analysis we plan to compare the duration for which infants fixate in the corner toward which the model directs their attention to in the test trials based on the factors of the infants’ age, the race of the model, and the language of the phrase. Preliminary data from 13 monolingual 6-month-old infants tested with same-race faces indicate that infants fixate longer at the gaze-directed corners when the model speaks in native German versus non-native French.

Authors

• Anna Krasotkina, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
  Presenting Author

• Julia Dillmann, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Schreiber, University of Giessen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Olivier Laurent Clerc, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hélène Loevenbruck, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Olivier Pascalis, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gudrun Schwarzer, University of Giessen
  Non-Presenting Author