Cross-modal integration of language and face cues in German and French infants

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The project aims to investigate when and how infants are able to link audio speech cues and visual face cues in a coherent and meaningful representation. The few studies investigating this question provided surprising links between voice characteristics and facial movements but so far failed to identify any relevant matching cues. We aim to determine when this link emerges, how specific it is to a particular language and whether it narrows to the native language toward the end of the first year. To address those questions we will use two languages, French and German, that greatly differ in terms of phonetics and prosody. On the contrary, German and French faces are rather similar which will avoid any "other-race effect". In 5 experiments, we will systematically investigate the proposed link between auditory and visual face cues and the role of phonetic and prosodic information. Using languages which belong to the same or different rhythmic classes as German or French, we also intend to investigate the generalization of the visual-auditory association. We will study whether the link can be generalized to languages belonging to the same rhythmic class, such as English (like German) and Spanish (like French). The cross-linguistic aspect of the project requires a French-German collaboration. This makes it possible to recruit and study French and German learning infants from monolingual families. Most previous cross linguistic studies focused on very different topics and only tested participants from one language with different language Stimuli. The intended project, however, will take advantage of a cross-over design and use the unique possibility of a French-German collaboration to study participants with different native languages by using the same language Stimuli in a joint project.