Precursors to perspective taking: Examining monolingual and bilingual infants' attention to social cues

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Almost 25% of children in the US grow up in bilingual homes, many of whom speak Spanish. Bilingual toddlers attend to social cues and perceive emotions and faces differently than toddlers growing up in monolingual homes. Bilingual exposure also alters how flexibly they learn, how they communicate, and when they begin to take the perspectives of others. These differences are likely due to the fact that language, memory, and perception systems are less specialized early in development, and early modifications in one system affect the later development of other systems. The proposed studies will identify how social communication develops in bilingual and monolingual children. These findings could be used to develop more effective teaching strategies for early education. Early educators will be then able to use these findings to capitalize on protective factors rewarding children for strong communication skills and flexibility. Prior studies have not considered how systems develop across time. The proposed studies will bridge that gap in the research. The researchers will use eye tracking tasks to examine emotion and language processing in 9-month-olds. Because face processing involves flexible switching to appropriate cues, they will also examine the infants’ memory flexibility. The infants will be tracked and retested at 15 months on a gaze switching task, a perspective-taking task, and a social communication inventory. It is predicted that early bilingual differences in face processing and flexible learning will be related to later social communication skills. Practices that maximize the strengths of bilingual children could enhance communication and broader learning within the entire student population.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.