Look who’s talking: Interactions between face processing and speech perception during perceptual narrowing in monolingual and bilingual German and French infants – BabyFaceSpeech

From the beginning of life infants are exposed to talking faces. During their first year they become attuned to their native language as well as to faces which belong to their parents’ ethnic group. In learning their native language, infants will use auditory as well as visual information. Although parallels in infants' speech and face processing have been assumed, systematic research on the development of both abilities is still lacking. It is the aim of this project to investigate this issue by analyzing the interaction between speech and face processing in infants. In particular, we will investigate the extent to which this interaction is shaped by perceptual narrowing, which has been shown to take place in both modalities, and whether this interaction is modulated by bilingualism. To address these questions we will test native vs. non-native speech and own- vs. other-race face processing in French and German mono- and bilingual infants. These infants belong to the same Caucasian ethnic group, which will allow us to systematically test the influence of varying native languages by keeping ambient face race constant. We will investigate the proposed interaction between speech and face processing in 4 experiments. In the first set of experiments we will assess whether infants’ integration of audio-visual speech differs when the faces of the speakers belong to an unfamiliar race and when infants grow up bilingually. In a second set, we will examine the role of language in the emergence of the implicit racial bias in infants . We want first to uncover if native language is more likely to be associated to infants’ own race and vice versa and if this association impacts infants’ confidence in other people. Our unique French-German collaboration between baby labs makes it possible to address these crucial questions on infants’ audio-visual processing in two typologically different languages with a single face category. It will also allow us to have access to a large population of bilingual infants, among which we expect a sufficient number of French-German bilinguals. The expected theoretical outcome of the BabyFaceSpeech project is a thorough account of the interaction between speech and face processing during development and of the modulatory role of bilingualism on multimodal perceptual narrowing. Our project also has clinical applications as it will provide standards to assess infants who are at risk for speech and face processing delays and disorders (such as specific language impairment, autism spectrum syndrome, developmental prosopagnosia or developmental phonagnosia). The BabyFaceSpeech project also has societal outcomes as it will help disentangle factors that influence the development of the implicit racial bias.