Development of native language preference in the visual modality.

Abstract

Infants have been known to be able to discriminate two languages using just the visual cues to speech. [Weikum et al., “Visual language discrimination in infancy,” Science, 316, 1159 (2007)]. There have been no studies that have investigated whether infants can use this ability in their language acquisition. We investigated the importance of visual cues in language acquisition by determining whether infants show a preference for their native language when they just have access to speech in the visual modality. All infants were tested using the visual fixation procedure. Monolingual 4‐ and 8‐month‐old infants were presented with side‐by‐side videos of a bilingual speaker producing English and Spanish sentences. Infants' looking time to each video was calculated and compared statistically. Preliminary data from 4‐month‐olds show that monolingual English‐learning infants look longer to the English stimuli. Results will be discussed in the context of the influence of visual cues in auditory speech perception.