1. T HE EFFECT OF E THNICITY ON V ISUAL L ANGUAGE D ISCRIMINATION Cathy Lin 4 th year directed study student in Psychology and Linguistics With Drs. Janet Werker and Whitney Weikum

2. D EFINITION Visual language discrimination discriminate languages using visual information alone, without any auditory information

3. I NTRODUCTION Taiwan Malaysi a Official language: Mandarin Dialects: Min-nan Hakka

4. I NTRODUCTION Other languages: Malay Hindi English Other Ethnicities: Malay Indian Caucasians

5. W HY ? When learning languages, we are not only exposed to auditory information, but also visual cues Lip and jaw movement Facial features! Infants are sensitive to visual cues (Weikum et al, 2007, Patterson and Werker 1999;2003) Infants are also sensitive to facial racial cues (Kelly et al. 2005) Interested in knowing if exposure to faces of other race when young helps shape language- processing system

6. P REVIOUS S TUDIES Other-race effect (ORE): monolinguals prefer faces of their own ethnic group over those of other ethnic groups Strong, sustainable ORE emerges at 6 months old. (Kelly et al., 2007) ORE can be applied to faces of nonhuman primate (Pascalis et al., 2005) and natural languages (Kinzler et al., 2007) too.

7. P REVIOUS S TUDIES Bilingual French-English infants at 6 and 8 months can perform visual language discrimination (Weikum et al., 2007) Monolingual English infants can only discriminate at 6 months Experience with multiple languages since birth sustains ability in visual language discrimination.

8. R ESEARCH Q UESTION Previous study used Western languages and speakers of European descent. We used English and Mandarin as the test stimuli This study we incorporated speaker’s ethnicity as a variable to examine its effect on visual language discrimination.

9. R ESEARCH Q UESTION Can similar results be replicated when using English and Mandarin as the test stimuli? Does speaker’s ethnicity interact with infants’ ability to attend to the linguistic information on silent talking faces?

10. M ETHODS Participants: 6-month-old ethnic-Chinese Mandarin monolinguals ethnic-European English monolinguals Test stimuli: Silent video clips of 3 ethnic-Chinese bilingual Mandarin-English female speakers reciting sentences in English and Mandarin

11. M ETHODS : T EST S TIMULI Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Speaker 3

12. M ETHODS Bilingual/Ethnicities Questionnaire Habituation Paradigm 2 phases Habituation phase Testing phase

13. M ETHODS Habituation Paradigm Presentation Habituation PhaseTesting Phase

14. M ETHODS Bilingual/Ethnicities Questionnaire Habituation Paradigm 60% criterion (40 % decrease) 4 conditions Habituatio n Phase Testing Phase Participant s # Mandarin 16 MandarinEnglish16 English 16 EnglishMandarin16

15. M ETHODS HabitTestParticipant s # Ethnic- Chinese Mandarin Ethnic- European English Mandarin 168 (?)8 MandarinEnglish1688 English 168 (?)8 EnglishMandari n 1688

16. P REDICTIONS A. General prediction > Infants discriminate changes if habituated to nonpreferred stimuli and test with preferred stimuli (McCartney & Panneton, 2005). Ethnic- Chinese Mandarin monolinguals Ethnic- European English monolinguals Habituation PhaseTesting Phase MandarinEnglish Mandarin B. Ethnic-Chinese Mandarin monolinguals

17. P REDICTIONS c. Ethnic-European English monolinguals Habituation PhaseTesting Phase MandarinEnglish Mandarin

18. P RELIMINARY - RESULTS Right now, have run 7 Chinese monolinguals All in experimental condition All are Chinese monolinguals, with minimal contact with English and Ethnic-European faces All show recovery in looking time at testing phase (p=0.003)

19. D ISCUSSION For ethnic-Chinese Mandarin monolinguals, both the faces of the speakers and one of the languages are familiar But for ethnic-European English monolinguals, only one of the languages is familiar In the future, it will be interesting to look at how the infants respond to ethnic-European Mandarin-English bilingual speakers

20. R EFERENCES Kelly, D., Quinn, P., Slater, A., Lee, K., Ge, L., & Pascalis, O. (2007). The other-race effect develops during infancy: Evidence of perceptual narrowing. Psychological Science, 18 (12), 1084-1089. Kinzler, K.D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E.S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 12577-12580. McCartney, J., & Panneton, R. (2005). Four-Month-Olds' Discrimination of Voice Changes in Multimodal Displays as a Function of Discrimination Protocol. Infancy, 7 (2), 163-182. Pascalis, O., Scott, L., Kelly, D., Shannon, R., Nicholson, E., Coleman, M., et al. (2005, April). Plasticity of face processing in infancy. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102 (14),5297-5300. Patterson, M., & Werker, J. (1999). Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants. Infant Behavior & Development, 22 (2), 237-247.

21. Patterson, M., & Werker, J. (2003). Two-month-old infants match phonetic information in lips and voice. Developmental Science, 6 (2), 191-196. Weikum, W., Vouloumanos, A., Navarra, J., Soto-Faraco, S., Sebastián-Gallés, N., & Werker, J. (2007). Visual language discrimination in infancy. Science, 316 (5828), 1159-1159.

22. Thank you Questions?