Selective attention to the mouth is associated with expressive language skills in monolingual and bilingual infants.

ABSTRACT: Infants increasingly attend to the mouths of others during the latter half of the first postnatal year, and individual differences in selective attention to talking mouths during infancy predict verbal skills during toddlerhood. There is some evidence suggesting that trajectories in mouth-looking vary by early language environment, in particular monolingual or bilingual language exposure, which may have differential consequences in developing sensitivity to the communicative and social affordances of the face. Here, we evaluated whether 6- to 12-month-olds' mouth-looking is related to skills associated with concurrent social communicative development-including early language functioning and emotion discriminability. We found that attention to the mouth of a talking face increased with age

SUBMITTER: Tsang T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5933852 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature