EAPSI:Examining Visual Processing in Infants from Monolingual and Bilingual Environments

Antovich Dylan, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Infants from bilingual environments must overcome learning challenges beyond those faced by monolinguals, including the need to rapidly categorize linguistic input and to discover unique properties of multiple languages. This project will add to the literature exploring how bilingual infants accomplish this feat. Continued research on this topic is essential, as bilinguals are a majority in the world, but remain a minority in research on early development. One body of work suggests that very early bilingual experience may instill cognitive benefits, which in turn helps infants navigate multilingual environments. Many of the tasks used in these studies entail rapid visual processing, which may be one source of the observed bilingual advantages. Bilinguals must index their language input using numerous speech cues, including subtle differences in mouth movements across languages. Early experience identifying these visual cues in language may hone bilinguals? visual processing. To investigate this possibility, monolingual and bilingual infants will complete tasks that assess several language-relevant aspects of visual processing. This project will be undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Leher Singh at the National University of Singapore. As a diverse, multilingual country, Singapore is an ideal location for research on bilingualism, and will facilitate this investigation of cognitive development in bilingual environments. Early experience processing multiple languages may enhance visual short-term memory (VSTM) and visual selective attention (VSA) in infancy. VSTM encodes and retrieves visual features over short intervals. Bilingual processing may require VSTM to exploit the dynamic, rapidly changing details relevant for language discrimination. Categorizing language input in real time may also require infants to employ flexible VSA to discover the visual cues that identify each language. Continual use of these systems for language categorization may advance bilingual infants? domain-general VSTM and VSA, facilitating continued bilingual acquisition. In the current project, infant VSTM will be examined with a color change detection task. In this task, object color must be remembered across a brief delay in order to detect a change. VSA will be assessed with an object categorization task. Infants? ability to identify features that are diagnostic of an object?s category membership will be evaluated. We will use infrared eye-tracking to measure infants? success in both tasks. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Singapore.