Bilingual infants rely differently than monolinguals on facial information, such as lip patterns, to differentiate their native languages. This may explain, at least in part, why young monolinguals and bilinguals show differences in social attention. For example, in the first year, bilinguals attend faster and more often to static faces over non-faces than do monolinguals (Mercure et al., 2018). However, the developmental trajectories of these differences are unknown. In this pre-registered study, data were collected from 15- to 18-month-old monolinguals (English) and bilinguals (English and another language) to test whether group differences in face-looking behaviour persist into the second year. We predicted that bilinguals would orient more rapidly and more often to static faces than monolinguals. Results supported the first but not the second hypothesis. This suggests that, even into the second year of life, toddlers’ rapid visual orientation to static social stimuli is sensitive to early language experience.

双语婴儿与单语婴儿不同，他们依靠面部信息（例如嘴唇图案）来区分他们的母语。这至少可以部分解释为什么年轻的单语者和双语者在社会关注方面表现出差异。例如，在第一年，双语者比单语者更快、更频繁地关注静态面孔而不是非面孔（Mercure et al., 2018）。然而，这些差异的发展轨迹尚不清楚。在这项预先注册的研究中，收集了 15 至 18 个月大的单语者（英语）和双语者（英语和其他语言）的数据，以测试看脸行为的群体差异是否持续到第二年。我们预测，双语者会比单语者更快、更频繁地识别静态面孔。结果支持第一个假设，但不支持第二个假设。这表明，即使到了生命的第二年，幼儿对静态社交刺激的快速视觉定位对早期语言体验也很敏感。