Experience-Sensitive Effects on Temporal Profiles of Social Attention in Early Childhood

Bilinguals show differences in face processing compared to monolinguals, automatically orienting more rapidly to faces and dwelling longer on faces and mouths than monolinguals. However, it is difficult to identify specific visual strategies from average-level data. This pre-registered study uses growth curve analysis within trials to explore individual differences in monolingual and bilingual children's dynamic allocation of visual attention to static faces ("Face Pop-Out") and dynamic mouths ("50 Faces"). Participants were from Greater London in two age groups: 7- to 18-month-olds (n = 131) collected at the Birkbeck Babylab, and 18- to 34-month-olds (n = 745) whose data was publicly available from the Developing Human Connectome Project. Results show that children's attentional trajectories for viewing faces and mouths are sensitive to age and early language environment. Specifically, young bilinguals showed stronger systematic disengagement than monolinguals from faces and mouths after initial orientation. Older bilinguals prioritized the mouth more than monolinguals, driven by a steeper increase in mouth-looking over stimulus time. Age-dependent shifts in attentional allocation over stimulus time were evident within both age groups, particularly in static face viewing. In infants, younger children showed earlier re-fixations to static faces than older children. In toddlers, attention to faces was more stable over stimulus time in older than younger children. Overall, results suggest that age and early exposure to two languages modulates the temporal structure of children's social attention from 7- to 34-months of age.