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Birulés, J.; Goupil, L.; Josse, J.; Fort, M. Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/48466 (accessed on 17 May 2024).
Birulés J, Goupil L, Josse J, Fort M. Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/48466. Accessed May 17, 2024.
Birulés, Joan, Louise Goupil, Jérémie Josse, Mathilde Fort. "Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/48466 (accessed May 17, 2024).
Birulés, J., Goupil, L., Josse, J., & Fort, M. (2023, August 24). Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/48466
Birulés, Joan, et al. "Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning." Encyclopedia. Web. 24 August, 2023.
Talking Faces in Infant Language Learning
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This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/brainsci13081167

Developmental (psycho) linguists have demonstrated that perceiving talking faces audio-visually is important for early language acquisition. Using mostly well-controlled and screen-based laboratory approaches, this line of research has shown that paying attention to talking faces is likely to be one of the powerful strategies infants use to learn their native(s) language(s).

talking faces audiovisual speech perception infancy language acquisition naturalistic interactions audiovisual speech cues

1. Introduction

Speech is typically perceived multimodally: most social interactions occur face to face, so we not only hear our interlocutor but also see the information inherent to any facial articulatory movement and inherent to linguistic communication more specifically. Primarily, through the eye’s region, faces convey a good amount of information about a person’s state of mind, attitude, and potential intentions, as well as referential information and speech rhythms (see [1] for a review). Additionally, through the talker’s mouth region, we gain access to spatiotemporal and acoustic congruent auditory and visual speech cues [2][3]. Given that auditory and visual cues provide overlapping information about the same speech event, they have often been named “redundant audiovisual (AV) speech cues” (e.g., [4][5]). Prior studies have shown that access to such AV redundant speech cues, compared to auditory-only situations, can facilitate lexical access and, more largely, speech comprehension, most notably when the acoustic signal becomes difficult to understand due to noise [6][7][8][9][10][11] or to an unfamiliar accent or language (e.g., [12][13][14]). In such occasions, adult listeners have been shown to increase their visual attention (hereafter attention) to the talker’s mouth in order to maximize the processing of AV speech cues and enhance their processing of speech; for instance, when background acoustic noise increases [15][16], when volume is low [17], when their language proficiency is low [18][19][20], or when they are performing particularly challenging speech-processing tasks (e.g., speech segmentation [21] or sentences comparison [18]). On the other hand, when speech-processing demands are reduced, adults modulate their attention and focus more on the eyes of the talker [21][22][23], which can also support language understanding by constraining interpretations (e.g., of the speaker’s current emotion or current focus of attention).
Overall, these studies suggest that adults flexibly modulate their selective attention to subparts of a talking face as a function of factors such as the task at hand, the amount of noise in the sensory environment, and language experience.

2. The Role of Faces in Infants’ Attention and Language Acquisition: Evidence from Screen-Based Settings

2.1. Infants’ Preference for Faces

During their first year of life, most infants’ direct communicative interactions occur face to face with their caregivers (for an estimation in ecological situations, see [24][25]), which allows them to gain access to rich AV cues that dynamic talking faces provide. Crucially, on top of the fact that faces are readily accessible in infants’ typical visual field, screen-based studies attempting to mimic these face-to-face situations in the lab have revealed that infants also show a preference for face-like stimuli from very early on: they tend to orient toward faces preferably when in competition with other stimuli (e.g., [26]). It has been suggested that this early “face bias” is already present in newborns, who look longer on face-like patterns than inverted face-like patterns or different geometric patterns [27][28][29], although it is unclear whether this reflects a genuine preference for “faces” per se rather than a preference for some lower-level visual features of faces. Later, once infants’ visual system begins to be fully functional around 3 to 4 postnatal months [30], and they have gained some experience with their environment, infants’ preference for faces continues to increase, particularly when presented amongst multiple competing objects (4- to 12-month-old infants [31][32]). These studies suggest that infants routinely have a direct visual access to talking faces, and that they show a very early interest and increased attention to such information. Other studies suggest that infants’ attentional preference for faces after the age of 3–4 months cannot entirely be explained by low-level visual features, reflecting the onset of an active search for relevant information in faces [31]. In line with this hypothesis, studies have also shown that infants do not attend to speakers’ faces as much when they do not engage in communicatively relevant interactions, such as a mutual gaze [33][34], which enhances their cortical processing of faces and face recognition skills [35][36].
In summary, it has been discussed that learning to process interlocutors’ faces is likely to be a crucial aspect of infants’ social [37][38] and language learning (for recent reviews, see: [39][40][41]). However, which specific facial cues (i.e., eyes and eye-gaze, AV speech cues from the talker’s mouth) infants attend to and exploit at each moment in development and for which type of learning they might do so remains to be understood.

2.2. Infant’ Attention to the Eyes and Mouth of a Talking Face, and Its Relation to Language Acquisition

Prior studies have approached this question by exploring infants’ selective attention to videos of talking faces, analyzing their looking time to the internal features of a talker’s face (i.e., eyes and mouth) across development. Furthermore, some have examined how such measures of attention relate to infants’ concurrent and later language outcomes, providing correlational evidence that attending to the eyes or the mouth region of a talking face at different stages of development can support language learning (e.g., [42][43][44][45][46][47][48]).
On the one hand, studies suggest that paying attention to the eye region of a face can boost infant language learning: a direct gaze—rather than an indirect gaze—establishes the intent to communicate, and young infants are sensitive to these communicative signals [33][34][49][50]. Later, infants develop gaze- and head-following skills, which allow them to orient their attention at the same location as their social partners, creating joint attention moments between the infant and the caregiver, which can support word learning (see [41][51] for recent overviews). Of particular relevance for lexical acquisition, following the gaze/head of a speaker in the direction of a named object can allow listeners to disambiguate which object is associated with the novel spoken label [52], thus solving the referential uncertainty problem (i.e., the uncertainty inherent in mapping a heard name to its intended referent, in a complex and variable environment [53]).
On the other hand, paying attention to the mouth of a talking face can also be useful for enhancing speech processing and infant language acquisition (e.g., [54]). As reviewed above, adults rely on the AV speech cues of a talker’s mouth to enhance speech perception, especially when speech processing becomes challenging (e.g., [15]). Prior evidence shows that infants are sensitive to AV correspondences from 2 to 3 months of age (e.g., [55][56]). Their auditory perception of speech is influenced by its concurrent visual presentation from 5 months of age (i.e., McGurk effect; [57]), and they can use AV speech information to discriminate and learn speech sounds [58][59], segment speech [60] and increase word processing and retention [61][62]; see for reviews [39][41]. It is then reasonable to hypothesize that orienting and sustaining one’s attention on a talker’s mouth could be a good strategy for enhancing language acquisition at various levels during infancy.

3. The Role of Faces in Infants’ Attention and Language Acquisition: Evidence from Real-Life Communicative Interactions

During real-life interactions, talking faces appear within the realm of complex, multimodal, and only partially predictable socio-communicative interactions. This is a different situation compared to what has happened in most studies examining the role of talking faces for infant language learning using screen-based tasks. Indeed, in virtually all these studies (including some work from the authors), non-contingent face stimuli have often appeared exaggerated in size and presented against a rather neutral background with no or very few distractors on a computer screen (e.g., [42][44][46][63][64][65][66][67]). These presentation characteristics could lead to a distortion in the perceptual saliency of talking faces and their role in guiding infants’ attention and language processing and learning.
Differently, however, if we extract descriptive statistics from real-life studies that examine how infants visually explore their environment in naturalistic contexts, which are thought to afford language learning (e.g., joint play), data suggest that faces comprise a smaller percentage of infants’ visual input (i.e., between 10 and 30%), and that such a percentage seems to decrease with age [24][25]. For instance, in free toy play situations, infants from 11 to 12 months of age achieve joint attention moments with their caregivers toward objects that are close to them (e.g., [68]) with little attentional guidance from their caregiver’s faces and head direction [69][70][71][72], and a seemingly greater impact of manual gestures [73]. These data could suggest that faces play a minor role in children’s social and language learning, at least after 11–12 months of life. It is expected that in free-flowing interactions, with higher stimulation and competition, infants should show lower face-looking times than in screen-based studies. Yet, this should remain constant over time; therefore, the fact that this preference decreases with age remains to be explained, as it contradicts the increase in age shown in screen-based studies. In other words, collectively, these findings suggest that the perceptual saliency of faces in naturalistic settings might be lower than what we would predict based on screen-based studies and the IRH [74].
Relatedly, infants’ free vs. restrained movement reasonably have a strong impact on infant attention. As infants grow up, motor and postural developments progressively transform their visual input, increasing its complexity and diversity [75][76] and affecting the relative saliency of talking faces. Infants shift from laying on their back and mainly looking up—towards the ceiling and the face(s) of their caregiver(s)—to sitting, then standing up and walking. Such novel postural and motor control affords infants a novel perspective of their environment by looking more frontally, reaching and grasping objects that surround them. Under this rationale, directly looking toward adults’ faces becomes less frequent, and infants engage more with specific subsets of their visual environment (e.g., hands, objects, food, etc., see [76]).
Overall, these studies exploring naturalistic interactions where infants move freely suggest that faces may be perceptually less salient and less frequently attended to than previously assumed based on screen-based studies and that, with increasing age, infants’ attention to faces diminishes. This suggests that infants’ need to deploy their attention toward the AV speech cues of speakers’ faces may also gradually decrease with increasing age and language proficiency. A potential explanation is that, indeed, infants’ information-seeking behavior becomes more and more optimal as they grow up and that, therefore, given that their cognitive and linguistic abilities improve, their selective attention to faces becomes less frequent but more targeted to certain specific situations when AV speech cues become relevant. These may involve situations where communicative information becomes unclear (due to referential uncertainty, speech ambiguity, noise, L2 speech, etc.) or when other social and emotional factors come into play (face identification, emotional reassurance, etc.). Therefore, infants may prioritize other stimuli while communication is clear and fluent and only look toward speakers’ faces in ambiguous situations.

4. Moving Closer to Real-Life Language Learning Interactions: Three Factors That Deserve More Attention

4.1. The Influence of Dyadic Bidirectional Contingency

The first factor that the researchers consider to be understudied in screen-based studies exploring the role of talking faces in language learning—that has also not been systematically explored or manipulated in naturalistic studies—concerns the bidirectional contingency between the infant and the talking face the infant is looking at. Typically, screen-based approaches provide very little temporal contingency between the shown stimuli and the infant’s behavior and mainly focus on the unidirectional adaptation of the infant to talking faces rather than considering this relation in a bidirectional fashion (e.g., [42][46][48][66]). In other words, in most screen-based paradigms, the behavior of the talking face is determined by the experimenter (e.g., pre-recorded) rather than by the participant. Talking faces almost never adapt to infants’ attentional variations across time (e.g., gaze direction), including emotional or sociolinguistic responses (e.g., smile, pointing, presence of babbling, or imitation of the speaker). Overall, this lack of bidirectional contingency could lead to an underestimation of the dynamic components of dyadic interactions in real-life situations, which are known to modulate infants’ attention and language learning, e.g., [68][77][78][79]. More specifically, it could lead to an overestimation of the infants’ adaptation to the caregiver’s face behavior and/or underestimating the adaptation of the caregiver’s face as a response to the infant’s behavior.
In summary, the growing literature suggests that social contingency is a key factor for infant learning, including language acquisition, but the extent to which it also shapes the way infants attend to and process a speaker’s face remains unclear. A necessary next step for research on the use of AV speech cues for infants’ language learning will, thus, be, in the researchers' opinion, to examine how social contingency and other factors related to the dialogic nature of early caregiver–infant communication (e.g., turn-taking rates and structure, the predictability of social interactions, etc. [80][81]), shape infants’ disposition to selectively attend to and process the speakers’ faces, eyes and mouths.

4.2. The Influence of Speakers’ Characteristics

Another variable that typically differs from screen-based to real-life studies, and which has also been largely understudied, is the type of speakers that infants are presented with or interact with. Screen-based settings that measure infant attention to talking faces systematically use unrelated strangers that often talk in IDS. By contrast, in real-life settings, infants are typically interacting with their caregivers, who sometimes show less consistent uses of IDS, for instance, when infants are not responsive to their solicitations (e.g., [82]). It is, therefore, possible that a speaker’s familiarity and differential use of IDS could account for the differences in attention to faces observed between screen-based and real-life setting studies.
First, low familiarity with an unknown speaker could enhance infants’ attention to the speaker’s face and talking mouth: such a strategy could help infants build speech representations across speakers (i.e., speaker normalization): a necessary and non-trivial step in early language acquisition [83][84]. Paying more attention to the caregiver’s face could also help infants evaluate the expertise of the unfamiliar speaker, estimating, for instance, their social group. Indeed, categorizing the speaker as either belonging or not to the same social group as the infant (in or out group) can change the way they expect and process speech information from this person (see [85][86]).
Second, the more systematic use of IDS in screen-based than in real-life settings could also influence the amount of time infants spend looking toward the face and, more specifically, the talking mouth of their caregivers. Indeed, screen-based settings that experimentally manipulate this factor have shown that IDS is more often associated with faces [87][88] and elicits more mouth looks than adult-directed speech [89][90][91]. In other words, the salient acoustic features of IDS could help infants orient and sustain not only their auditory attention to the speech signal (see [92] for a compatible hypothesis) but also their visual attention to the face, and especially to the talking mouth of their caregivers. In line with this idea, caregivers have been shown to flexibly modify the pitch of their IDS as a function of their infant’s responsiveness/feedback [82]. Further research should study more precisely the acoustic features that might attract infants’ visual attention toward the face or mouth of speakers and whether this behavior is also observed in more complex and usually noisier real-life situations.

4.3. The Influence of Dyadic Bidirectional Contingency

The last variable that the researchers believe deserves attention, and that also differs from screen-based to real-life studies, is the type of interaction or situation that infants are presented with during an experiment. Most of the evidence gathered from screen-based studies originates from one type of situation: a video showing a close-up of a speaker’s face, talking to the infant, against a neutral background, with no or a very small number of objects or other types of distractors. This situation is supposed to mimic everyday face-to-face interactions where parents talk to their infant while sitting on a chair (e.g., during eating, spoon-feeding) or laying down on his/her back (e.g., during a diaper change or before sleeping). During the first months of their life, while mobility is reduced, real dyadic interactions can resemble these—where faces are at a short distance—and observations of caregivers and their infants younger than 9–12 months reflect this [24][25].
These situational differences are relevant and should be considered when drawing conclusions about how infants deploy their attention, as infants’ attentional strategies are known to be task-dependent [93][94][95], and, therefore, infants adapt and change their behavior according to the typology of these situations. Prior studies using head-mounted eye trackers have shown that, indeed, infants mostly modulate their attention to the body and face of their mother as a function of task/situation (e.g., reaching, removing obstacles, crawling) and the mother’s position and actions [96].
Further research should thus explore the dynamics of infants’ selective attention across various situations (e.g., face-to-face interaction during feeding or table-top play sessions vs. side-by-side play interactions on a mat, etc.) in order to understand the way in which these specific settings (i.e., situational or task demands) modulate infants’ reliance on the AV speech cues of talking faces.

5. Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

Here, the researchers discuss the role of infants’ attention to talking faces as a mechanism to enhance speech processing and language learning (see also [39][40] for screen-based studies reviews). The originality of the approach is that it puts into perspective findings from both screen-based and real-life settings and then focuses on the specific factors that might be most influential yet are currently understudied in both methodologies that explore AV speech perception for early language acquisition.
While it appears clear that attending and processing AV speech cues from talkers’ faces is an important mechanism that supports infants’ language learning, it has been seen that studies to date remain quite specific to their context and methodology (e.g., screen-based, non-contingent paradigms, or real-life, observational-only paradigms, all providing mostly correlational evidence) and that there are several important factors that need to be better explored in order to reduce the gap between the researchers' experimental studies and infants’ real-life learning mechanisms.
Crucially, given that infants’ attention to faces in real-life interactions is less frequent than previously thought or observed by screen-based studies and that it diminishes with increasing age, it becomes highly relevant for future studies to identify in which specific situations of their daily life, such as from the perspective of language learning, infants and children seek AV speech information in their caretaker’s faces. To approach this question, we might have to explore factors pertaining to the specific task or experimental situation, resembling real-life routines (e.g., play, book sharing, eating) that are known to foster language acquisition, but also factors relative to the person addressing the infant (e.g., caregiver, unknown experimenter, foreign language speaker, etc.). Finally, it is believed that the dynamic aspects of communication, such as social contingency (i.e., the adaptation of infants’ behavior to the caregiver’s face and vice versa), should also be explored in future studies, aiming to move away from “passive-learning” paradigms and introduce contingency and infants’ intrinsic motivation to move closer to real-life learning situations.
Given that infants allocate their attention as a function of their current informational needs and goals [97][98][99], it is likely that the above-mentioned factors (i.e., speakers’ familiarity, task dependencies, and social contingency) change infants’ motivation to learn from and about speakers [100], thus modulating their attention toward talking faces, and, in turn, learning. Future studies that systematically vary the relevance of speakers, faces, and contrasting stimuli using different methodologies could help to better understand the extent to which infants’ early preference for faces is perceptual and category-specific rather than attention-based and dependent on self-relevance and motivational factors.
Finally, this perspective also suggests that inter-individual differences in infants’ typical home environment and caregiving practices could greatly modulate infants’ attention and reliance on talking faces for learning their native language, for instance, as a function of the relative frequency of face-to-face vs. side-to-side interactions in their homes. Most research in this area has focused on Westerners, so it remains plausible that exploiting visual information from talking faces is only one of many strategies that infants could use to support language acquisition. For instance, face-to-face interactions involving a mutual gaze are thought to be more common in Western cultures compared to side-to-side interactions involving mutual touch in other cultures [101]. It is, therefore, possible that other strategies and modalities (e.g., touch, gestures) are more privileged than the visual modality outside of Western cultural settings. Studying infants’ attention to talking faces and bodies in culturally more varied samples and real-life interactions is, therefore, an important venue for future research and is important to better document diversities and universalities in the ways infants learn their native language/s.

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Subjects: Development Studies
Contributors MDPI registered users' name will be linked to their SciProfiles pages. To register with us, please refer to https://encyclopedia.pub/register :
Joan Birulés
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Louise Goupil
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Jérémie Josse
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Mathilde Fort
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Update Date: 25 Aug 2023
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