A study from Cambridge and Singapore reveals that infants learn language patterns more effectively when speakers’ eyes are visible, highlighting eye contact’s crucial role in early speech acquisition and neural synchrony.
A new study suggests that a baby’s ability to learn language may depend not just on what is said, but on whether the speaker’s eyes are visible. Researchers working in Cambridge and Singapore found that infants were more likely to pick up patterns in an invented language when they could clearly see the speaker’s eyes, even though the babies watched the videos equally closely in every condition.
The experiment, published in Nature Communications, involved 47 babies with an average age of 9.4 months. A female speaker recited made-up syllables in a video while wearing specially adapted glasses that made her eyes appear clear, dimmed or fully hidden. Although her gaze remained fixed on the camera and the infants’ attention to the videos did not change, the babies only learned the language pattern when the eyes were visible.
Victoria Leong, who leads the EMPOWER Centre at Nanyang Technological University and is also a researcher at the University of Cambridge, said she was surprised that babies seemed just as attentive when the eyes were obscured, yet showed no measurable brain synchrony or learning in that setting. The study found that when the speaker’s eyes were clear, infants looked longer at unfamiliar sound combinations, a sign they had detected the pattern. That effect weakened as the eyes became darker and almost disappeared when they were hidden altogether.
The researchers also recorded brain activity from both the babies and the speaker, finding evidence of brain-to-brain coupling, in which the infant’s neural activity tracked the adult’s. Stronger synchrony was linked with better language learning and accounted for 24.6% of the differences between infants. Leong said the findings suggest attention alone is not enough and that eye contact appears to help trigger a more selective learning process.
The study fits with earlier research showing that eye gaze supports infant language development by helping babies map words to objects, process speech and sustain memory and attention. Other work has found that young infants shift their focus between a speaker’s eyes and mouth as they develop, with attention to facial cues helping them extract audiovisual information from speech. Separate research also suggests that infant-directed speech and song draw babies’ eyes towards the mouth over the first year of life.
Even so, Leong stressed that the video setup was used to isolate the effect of eye contact and should not be taken as a substitute for live interaction. She said face-to-face communication still offers social signals that screens cannot fully reproduce, including natural gaze and touch.
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