From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical…

Typically developing (TD) infants adapt to the social world in part by shifting the focus of their processing resources to the relevant aspects of a visual scene. Any impairment in visual orienting may therefore constrain learning and development in domains such as language. However, although something is known about visual orienting in infants at…

In the language development literature, studies often make inferences about infants' speech perception abilities based on their responses to a single speaker. However, there can be significant natural variability across speakers in how speech is produced (i.e., inter-speaker differences). The current study examined whether inter-speaker…

Preterm birth (<37 gestational weeks) is associated with long-term risks for health and neurodevelopment, but recently, studies have also started exploring how preterm birth affects early language development in the 1st year of life. Because the timing and quality of auditory and visual input is very different for preterm versus full-term…

Between 6 and 9 months, while infant's ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as…

Efficient visual exploration in infancy is essential for cognitive and language development. It allows infants to participate in social interactions by attending to faces and learning about objects of interest. Visual scanning of scenes depends on a number of factors, and early differences in efficiency are likely contributing to differences in…

Infants in low-resource settings are at heightened risk for compromised cognitive development due to a multitude of environmental insults in their surroundings. However, the onset of adverse outcomes and trajectory of cognitive development in these settings is not well understood. The aims of the present study were to adapt the Mullen Scales of…

Infants are interested in eyes, but look preferentially at mouths toward the end of the first year, when word learning begins. Language delays are characteristic of children developing with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We measured how infants at risk for ASD, control infants, and infants who later reached ASD criterion scanned facial features.…

The infant brain may be predisposed to identify perceptually salient cues that are common to both signed and spoken languages. Recent theory based on spoken languages has advanced sonority as one of these potential language acquisition cues. Using a preferential looking paradigm with an infrared eye tracker, we explored visual attention of hearing…

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is associated with significant language and communication delays, as well as problems with attention. This study investigated early language abilities in infants and toddlers with FXS (n = 13) and considered visual attention as a predictor of those skills. We found that language abilities increased over the study period of…

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

Object substitutions in play (e.g. using a box as a car) are strongly linked to language learning and their absence is a diagnostic marker of language delay. Classic accounts posit a symbolic function that underlies both words and object substitutions. Here we show that object substitutions depend on developmental changes in visual object…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word-object association, 14 months; MBCDI…

Perceptual grouping has traditionally been thought to be governed by innate, universal principles. However, recent work has found differences in Japanese and English speakers' non-linguistic perceptual grouping, implicating language in non-linguistic perceptual processes (Iversen, Patel, & Ohgushi, 2008). Two experiments test Japanese- and…