Eye gaze helps infants communicate. Through everyday interactions, eye gaze establishes a social connection between parent and child and is linked to early word learning.

But can learning experiences before a baby鈥檚 first birthday prompt babies to pay more attention to their parent鈥檚 eye gaze?

To test this, a research team led by the 天美影视传媒鈥檚 Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) sought out Deaf infants raised by Deaf parents 鈥� families who primarily use visual language and visual cues.

The result 鈥� early experiences do matter: Deaf infants exposed to American Sign Language demonstrated strong gaze-following behavior 鈥� and at a more advanced level than hearing infants. The , published Oct. 15 in the journal Developmental Science, stems from broader research into early learning and finds that Deaf infants of Deaf parents may be more attuned than hearing infants to the social and visual signals of others.

鈥淐hildren adapt to the people who communicate with them,鈥� said , a research scientist at I-LABS and lead author of the study. 鈥淲hatever your social context is, you鈥檙e learning from the people around you. Children thrive through interactions with other people. This work shows that children tune into social cues in their environment starting from early infancy.鈥�

While gaze following in hearing infants has been studied, the behavior hasn鈥檛 been formally examined in Deaf infants.

鈥淚nformal observations of Deaf infants interacting with their Deaf parents have suggested that these infants possess keen control over their eye-gaze behavior. To evaluate this, we set up a controlled experiment and tracked the gaze behavior of multiple infants,鈥� said Jenny Singleton, a linguistics professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study. of Deaf infants have Deaf parents, thus the research team needed to recruit Deaf infants from across the country.

For this study, 12 Deaf infants participated, along with 60 hearing infants of the same age. Both groups had natural experience with language from birth with their families 鈥� the Deaf infants with visual language (American Sign Language) and the hearing infants with spoken language.

During the study, each infant sat with a parent, facing a researcher across a table. The researcher set up the room with two objects, one on either side of the infant. Silently, the researcher then looked to one of the two objects, and a camera recorded the infant鈥檚 response. Each trial was objectively 鈥渟cored鈥� based on where the infant directed their gaze.

Scores showed that the Deaf infants were nearly twice as likely as hearing infants to accurately follow the gaze of an adult. Younger Deaf infants (those between 7 and 14 months old) were even more likely to do so than hearing peers.

The accelerated gaze following among Deaf infants could be related to their exposure to sign language. 鈥淎 signed language environment creates a natural demand on young infants to shift their eye gaze between their parent (who is signing) and the world of interesting objects. Deaf infants may also have enhanced visual control as a result of their sole reliance on visual cues, and not auditory cues,鈥� said Singleton.

In the experiment, Deaf infants were also more apt to look back at the adult after following the adult鈥檚 gaze. This 鈥渃hecking back鈥� behavior is a form of communication, which can indicate that the infant is seeking more information from the adult. Hearing infants can learn from both what an adult looks at and what the adult verbally says about it; Deaf infants must rely on visual cues.

, co-director of I-LABS and a co-author of the study, added, 鈥淒eaf infants, like hearing infants, strive to communicate with others. They are raised with a visual language and become exquisitely attuned to the visual signals from adults.鈥�

There is a more general lesson about human nature, too, Meltzoff said: 鈥淭he human mind and brain flexibly adapt to achieve our fundamental birthright 鈥� connections to others.鈥�

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center and the I-LABS Innovative Research Fund.

For more information, contact Brooks at recheleb@uw.edu.

New findings by researchers at the (I-LABS) at the 天美影视传媒 demonstrate for the first time that an early social behavior called gaze shifting is linked to infants’ ability to learn new language sounds.

Babies about 10 months old who engaged in more gaze shifting during sessions with a foreign language tutor showed a boost in a brain response that indicates language learning, according to , which is published in the current issue of Developmental Neuropsychology.

“Our study provides evidence that infants’ social skills play a role in cracking the code of the new language,” said co-author , co-director of I-LABS.

“We found that the degree to which infants visually tracked the tutors and the toys they held was linked to brain measures of infant learning, showing that social behaviors give helpful information to babies in a complex natural language learning situation,” Kuhl said.

Gaze shifting, when a baby makes eye contact and then looks at the same object that the other person is looking at, is one of the earliest social skills that babies show.

“These moments of shared visual attention develop as babies interact with their parents, and they change the baby’s brain,” said co-author , research assistant professor at I-LABS.

In an , Brooks and others showed that infant gaze shifting serves as a building block for more sophisticated language and social skills as measured in preschool children.

“Since gaze shifting is linked to a larger vocabulary in preschoolers, we suspected that eye gaze might be important earlier when babies are first learning the sounds of a new language, and we wanted to use brain measures to test this,” Brooks said.

In the experiment, 9.5-month-old babies from English-speaking households attended foreign language tutoring sessions. Over four weeks, the 17 infants interacted with a tutor during 12 25-minute sessions. The tutors read books and talked and played with toys while speaking in Spanish.

At the beginning and end of the four-week period, researchers counted how often the infants shifted their eye gaze between the tutor and the toys the tutor showed the baby.

After the tutoring sessions ended, the researchers brought the babies back to the lab to see how much Spanish the babies had learned. This was measured by their brain responses to English and Spanish sounds. The babies listened to a series of language sounds while wearing an electroencephalography (EEG) cap to measure their brain activity.

The results showed that the more gaze shifting the babies participated in during their tutoring sessions, the greater their brain responses were to the Spanish language sounds.

“Our findings show that young babies’ social engagement contributes to their own language learning 鈥� they’re not just passive listeners of language,” Brooks said. “They’re paying attention, and showing parents they’re ready to learn when they’re looking back and forth. That’s when the most learning happens.”

The study builds on by Kuhl’s team, which found that babies from English-speaking households could learn Mandarin from live tutors, but not from video or audio recordings of Mandarin and from at I-LABS establishing the importance of infant eye gaze for language learning.

The researchers hope their findings help parents, caregivers and early childhood educators develop strategies for teaching young children.

“Babies learn best from people,” Brooks said. “During playtime your child is learning so much from you. Spending time with your child matters. Keeping them engaged 鈥� that’s what helps them learn language.”

Lead author of the paper is Barbara Conboy of the University of Redlands, who did the research as a postdoctoral fellow at I-LABS. , co-director of I-LABS, is also a co-author.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health funded the study.