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MB1G Lab Manual

Contact: Krista Byers-Heinlein

322 babies tested by 11 labs

27 authors from 11 countries on Infancy publication

In this project we investigated the development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolinguals, and do not always have access to the same word learning heuristics (e.g., mutual exclusivity).

To test the hypothesis that bilingual experience would lead to a more pronounced ability to follow another’s gaze, we tested a total of 93 6–9 month-old and 229 12–15 month-old monolingual and bilingual infants (from 11 labs in 8 countries) in a gaze-following paradigm developed by Senju and Csibra (2008). Monolingual and bilingual infants showed similar gaze-following abilities, and both groups showed age-related improvements in speed, accuracy, frequency and duration of fixations (Figures 1 & 2). Unexpectedly, bilinguals tended to make more frequent fixations to onscreen objects, whether or not they were cued by the actor.

Our findings suggest that gaze sensitivity is a fundamental aspect of development that is robust to variation in language exposure.

Figure 1. Forest plots for the cross-laboratory meta-analyses on the proportion of first looks (left) and frequency of looks (right) to the congruent AOI. Error bars show 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 2. The linear regression models predicting the duration of fixations (left) and the frequency of shifts (right). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals.

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Publications

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Byers-Heinlein, K., Tsui, R. K. Y., van Renswoude, D., Black, A. K., Barr, R., Brown, A., Colomer, M., Durrant, S., Gampe, A., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hay, J. F., Hernik, M., Jartó, M., Kovács, A. M., Laoun-Rubenstein, A., Lew-Williams, C., Liszkowski, U., Liu, L., Noble, C., ... Singh, L. (2020). The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-lab study. Infancy, 26(1), 4-38. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12360
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Krista Byers-Heinlein
Rachel Ka-Ying Tsui
Daan van Renswoude
Alexis K. Black
Rachel Barr
Anna Brown
Marc Colomer
Samantha Durrant
Anja Gampe
Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez
Jessica F. Hay
Mikołaj Hernik
Marianna Jarto
Ágnes Melinda Ková­cs
Alexandra Laoun-Rubenstein
Casey Lew-Williams
Ulf Liszkowski
Liquan Liu
Claire Noble
Christine E. Potter
Joscelin Rocha-Hidalgo
Nuria Sebastian-Galles
Melanie Soderstrom
Ingmar Visser
Connor Waddell
Stephanie Wermelinger
Leher Singh

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