Does bilingualism keep babies open to unfamiliar faces and sounds?
Bilingual infants maintain the ability to distinguish unfamiliar foreign speech sounds but still lose the ability to tell apart unfamiliar other-race faces.
Source
Bilingual Infants Demonstrate Perceptual Flexibility in Phoneme Discrimination but Perceptual Constraint in Face Discrimination
What they did
The researchers studied a group of 32 Chinese infants who were around 10 to 11.5 months of age. There were 16 monolingual infants with at least 90% exposure to English, and 16 bilingual infants with at least 25% exposure to Mandarin. Each infant participated in separate habituation tasks measuring their ability to distinguish native speech sounds, foreign Hindi speech sounds, own-race Chinese faces, and other-race African faces.
What they found
Both monolingual and bilingual infants successfully discriminated native speech contrasts and own-race Chinese faces. However, only bilingual infants showed a significant increase in looking time when presented with the unfamiliar non-native Hindi speech contrast. Crucially, neither group of infants was able to discriminate the unfamiliar other-race African faces, demonstrating that bilingualism's protective effect against perceptual narrowing did not transfer from language to face processing.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study used a small sample of 32 Chinese infants, meaning the findings might not generalize to other cultural or ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, because exposure to multiple languages is an environmental variable rather than a randomized treatment, this study cannot definitively prove a causal link. Additionally, African faces were the sole other-race stimulus used, leaving it unclear if infants would respond differently to other-race faces they might occasionally encounter, such as Caucasian faces. Finally, the researchers could not videotape trials for off-line verification, meaning looking times could not be double-checked by a second, blind coder.
Key terms
- Perceptual narrowing
- A developmental process where infants lose the ability to distinguish stimuli not present in their daily environment, such as non-native speech sounds or other-race faces.
- Other-race effect
- The tendency for individuals to more easily recognize and distinguish faces of their own racial group compared to those of other racial groups.
- Phoneme
- The smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another.
- Habituation
- A psychological learning process wherein an infant shows decreased responses to a stimulus after repeated presentations.
- Domain-general mechanism
- A cognitive theory suggesting that a single underlying learning process governs development across multiple separate sensory or cognitive domains.
- Domain-specific mechanism
- A cognitive theory proposing that different sensory or cognitive systems, such as face or language processing, develop independently using distinct specialized processes.
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Quiz yourself
What is the developmental process of "perceptual narrowing" in infancy?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use African faces and Hindi speech sounds?
They chose these stimuli because they were entirely unfamiliar to the Chinese infants living in Singapore, creating a clean test for how infants process stimuli completely absent from their daily environment.
Does this mean bilingual babies are smarter or have better overall vision?
No, it suggests that bilingual infants maintain a specific, flexible openness to diverse language sounds, but this flexibility is domain-specific and does not automatically translate into general visual or facial recognition advantages.
Why would language experience affect face perception in the first place?
Some theories suggest that both speech and face processing share a single, domain-general developmental system during infancy; if so, keeping that system 'open' via bilingualism might have also kept face perception open.
How did the researchers know if the babies could tell the sounds or faces apart?
They used a habituation method, repeatedly showing the baby a stimulus until they got bored and looked away, then introducing a new one; if the babies looked longer at the new stimulus, it proved they detected the difference.
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