Social orienting – directing attention towards social over non-social stimuli – is heightened in bilingual infants and toddlers (Mousley et al., 2023), and thought to facilitate dual-language acquisition. We asked whether bilinguals’ increased social orienting extends into the preschool years and adulthood. We propose that social orienting could be useful for navigating complex communicative environments beyond acquisition: Quick speaker recognition helps predict which language is impending. Efficient facial emotion processing provides a head start in intention-reading. Study 1 tested monolingual and multilingual American preschoolers using a novel visual search paradigm featuring social (faces) and non-social (fruits) targets. We investigated if multilingual preschoolers showed (a) faster social target detection and (b) greater distraction by social distractors, compared to monolinguals, and examined whether language entropy (Gullifer & Titone, 2020) predicted social orienting across language groups. Study 2 tested early multilingual and monolingual adults on the same paradigm. Results suggest that early multilingualism shapes social orienting across the lifespan.

From the first days of life, infants show a bias for social stimuli: they prefer faces over nonsocial patterns and human speech over any other type of sound (e.g. Pascalis et al., 2011; Vouloumanos et al., 2010). This social attunement forms the basis for rapid advances in face and language perception during the first year of life. Exposure to multiple languages amplifies infants’ face attraction: Compared to monolinguals, bilingual infants orient towards faces more quickly and spend more time exploring them (Mercure et al., 2018: Mousley et al., 2023). Bilinguals also show distinct facial scanning patterns (Pons et al., 2015, Birulés et al., 2019), likely arising from their specific audiovisual processing needs. How does this distinctive face response impact bilingual infants’ emerging social cognition? We examined face identity processing, a key socio-cognitive skill that undergoes significant maturation in the first year of life. We compared 35 monolingual and bilingual 9-month-old infants on a recognition paradigm featuring faces from different racial groups. The stimuli were silent and displayed chewing and blinking motions to provide non-linguistic, emotionally neutral social targets. We found that bilinguals, but not monolinguals successfully recognized the presented face identities. Eye tracking data revealed that this was due to more strategic face encoding: During habituation, bilinguals shifted attention away from the uninformative moving mouth and focused on the eyes, an attention pattern associated with improved recognition. Exploratory behavioural analyses further revealed increased facial mimicry of social targets in bilinguals, suggesting heightened social attunement. Together, these findings demonstrate that bilingual infants’ distinctive face response implies distinctive social processing.

People are better at recognizing faces from their own racial group than faces from other racial groups, a finding known as the Other-Race Effect (ORE). Although the ORE is implicated in many social processes and represents one of the most well-studied effects in the face perception literature, underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Major theories converge on the notion that other-race contact should reduce the ORE, yet research into this relationship has been limited by methodological constraints – both in measuring the ORE and in operationalizing racial contact. Our study investigates how lifetime racial contact shapes the ORE using a novel face discrimination paradigm with morphed face pairs (Black, East-Asian, White). Each trial presents two faces side by side, and participants judge whether they show the same person. Facial identity contrast is systematically manipulated via morphing software. This design minimizes extraneous cognitive demands and increases statistical power to detect the contact-ORE relationship. Discrimination response (same/different) and reaction times (RTs) are measured. We recruit Black, East-Asian and White monoracial and bi-/multiracial young adults (18-35) in the US. Testing two populations with markedly different racial contact experiences allows us to maximize between-subject variance in lifetime racial contact. We measure racial contact through separate childhood and adulthood questionnaires, along with objective indicators, to quantify racial contact experienced in different life periods. Importantly, although biracial participants are tested on two own-race groups, they are also tested on a third, “other” race. Results demonstrate that monoracial but not biracial participants show the ORE. Overall, biracial participants are more sensitive to the morphing manipulation, suggesting higher perceptual sensitivity regardless of stimulus face race. What is more, while monoracials show reduced sensitivity to the morphing manipulation for other-race faces, biracials show the reverse pattern. Finally, monoracials show within-task exposure effects (learning) only for own-race faces, whereas biracials show comparable learning for own- and other-race faces.

Communication comprises a wealth of multimodal signals (e.g., gestures, eye gaze, intonation) in addition to speech and there is a growing interest in the study of multimodal language by psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and computer scientists. The ECOLANG corpus provides audiovisual recordings and ELAN annotations of multimodal behaviours (speech transcription, gesture, object manipulation, and eye gaze) by British and American English-speaking adults engaged in semi-naturalistic conversation with their child (N = 38, children 3-4 years old, face-blurred) or a familiar adult (N = 31). Speakers were asked to talk about objects to their interlocutors. We further manipulated whether the objects were familiar or novel to the interlocutor and whether the objects could be seen and manipulated (present or absent) during the conversation. These conditions reflect common interaction scenarios in real-world communication. Thus, ECOLANG provides ecologically-valid data about the distribution and co-occurrence of multimodal signals across these conditions for cognitive scientists and neuroscientists interested in addressing questions concerning real-world language acquisition, production and comprehension, and for computer scientists to develop multimodal language models and more human-like artificial agents.

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an audio-visual corpus of caregiver–child dyads, English-speaking caregivers interacted with their children (N = 71, 24–58 months) in contexts in which the objects talked about were either familiar or unfamiliar to the child, and either physically present or displaced. The analysis of the range of vocal, manual, and looking behaviors caregivers produced suggests that caregivers used iconic cues especially in displaced contexts and for unfamiliar objects, using other cues when objects were present.

A growing body of research indicates that moral decision-making is influenced by language status. Across studies and language combinations, participants make more utilitarian judgements when responding to moral dilemmas in a foreign (L2), compared to a native (L1) language. One explanation for the Foreign Language Effect is a reduced access to social norms in L2, since normative knowledge is acquired early in life in the native language. To test this account, we provided Chinese-English late bilinguals with "temporary social norms": Upon dilemma presentation, response percentages of alleged previous participants were shown, representing either a deontological or utilitarian majority. We found that in English, participants conformed to utilitarian and deontological majority information, highlighting the malleability of moral decisions in an L2 context. In Chinese, participants only conformed to the utilitarian majority, potentially reflecting the influence of collectivist values. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between language, culture, and social norms in moral cognition.

Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish-learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however, rhythmically and phonologically close languages. This raises the possibility that bilinguals only rely on redundant audiovisual cues when their languages are close. To test this possibility, we exposed 15-month-old and 4- to 6-year-old close-language bilinguals (Spanish/Catalan) and distant-language bilinguals (Spanish/”other”) to videos of a talker uttering Spanish or Catalan (native) and English (non-native) monologues and recorded eye-gaze to the talker's eyes and mouth. At both ages, the close-language bilinguals attended more to the talker's mouth than the distant-language bilinguals. This indicates that language proximity modulates selective attention to a talker's mouth during early childhood and suggests that reliance on the greater salience of audiovisual speech cues depends on the difficulty of the speech-processing task.