Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Compared to monolinguals, bilingual children attend more to pragmatic cues, especially when they conflict with perceptualcues (Brojde et al., 2012). This longitudinal eye-tracking study investigated monolingual and bilingual two-year-olds (T1M age=24.3 months; T2 M age=27.6 months) visual attention in a word learning paradigm containing a conflict betweeneye gaze (pragmatic cue) and object salience (perceptual cue). Participants saw videos of a model looked looking at andlabeling either a salient or a nonsalient object. Next, participants saw the objects from the videos side-by-side onscreen, andheard either the target label or a novel distracter label. At T1, monolinguals (N=14) and bilinguals (N=10) showed similarlooking patterns during learning; at test, bilinguals modulated their looking to target and distracter objects differently thanmonolinguals. At T2, monolinguals and bilinguals showed similar looking patterns during all trials. These results suggestthat language background may differentially influence word learning and visual attention across development.