About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 11. Language, Communication

Abstract

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Diverse language environments have been associated with enhanced perspective-taking and social communication (see Gampe et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2024). Our preregistered study https://osf.io/zrymp/?view_only=ec4f9b4e5ae547fb8ae7d08c797efee8 replicates Liberman and colleagues (2017), where they found that 16-month-old children growing up in multilingual homes (>5% exposure to another language in the home) showed better perspective-taking skills on a barrier task. Expanding on these findings, we predict that we would also find differences in perspective-taking between monolingual and bilingual infants ages 14 to 16 months. Fifty 14- to 16-month-old (Mage = 465.9 days, SD = 28.36) monolingual (33) and bilingual (17) infants completed the Liberman et al. (2017) barrier task. Data collection is ongoing and we will test 100 participants for the final sample. Infants were seated on their parent’s lap for the duration of the task. A barrier was placed on the table between the primary experimenter and the infant on the other side of the table. The barrier placement was counterbalanced. The task consisted of two conditions, the identical toy and the different toy condition (see Figure 1). First an experimenter placed the two items (identical or non-identical) in front of the child. In both cases, the primary experimenter asked for the object that they could see that was not behind the barrier. If the child was able to take the perspective of the experimenter, the infant should only give the experimenter the mutually visible object. Trials were coded as correct if the infant chose the item that was visible to both the experimenter and the child on the identical and non-identical trials (see Figure 2). We did not count trials where the infant response was ambiguous or if they reached for both objects on that trial. Both monolingual and bilingual infants performed significantly above chance (p < .001) on the proportion correct on identical and non-identical trials. Two sample t-tests showed there were no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals on identical (t(29.5) = 0.35 , p = .72) and non-identical trials (t(36.1) = 0.11, p = .91). Both groups evidenced perspective-taking and our findings did not replicate Liberman et al. (2017). It is important to note that we define an infant as bilingual if exposed to at least 20% of a second language (L2) as opposed to the 5% cutoff in the original study. Many of our monolingual children would have been classified as multilingual in the Liberman and colleagues study. We will use a continuous measure of second language exposure to investigate whether this changes our pattern of results. We will also use multilevel modeling logistic analysis to assess correct and incorrect performance across trials (see Rocha Hidalgo et al. (2022) for a similar approach) to examine whether additional individual differences contribute to the pattern of results.

Author information

Author	Role
Layla Stroer, Georgetown University	Presenting author
Ila Harvey, Georgetown University	Non-presenting author
Haifa Al Bassam, Georgetown University	Non-presenting author
Rebecca Cockroft, Georgetown University	Non-presenting author
Emily Kramer, Georgetown University	Non-presenting author
Sydney Wasserman, Georgetown University	Non-presenting author
Joscelin Rocha-Hidalgo, Georgetown University	Non-presenting author
Rachel Barr, Georgetown University	Non-presenting author

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