Using eye-tracking to understand relations between visual attention and language in children's spatial skills

Effect of hearing experience on preschool-aged children's eye gaze to a talker during spoken language processing

Speechreading-gathering speech information from talkers' faces-supports speech perception when speech acoustics are degraded. Benefitting from speechreading, however, requires listeners to visually fixate talkers during face-to-face interactions. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that preschool-aged children allocate their eye gaze to a talker when speech acoustics are degraded. We implemented a looking-while-listening paradigm to quantify children's eye gaze to an unfamiliar female talker and two images of familiar objects presented on a screen while the children listened to speech. We tested 31 children (12 girls), ages 26-48 months, who had normal hearing (NH group, n = 19) or bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and used hearing devices (D/HH group, n = 12). Children's eye gaze was video-recorded as the talker verbally labeled one of the images, either in quiet or in the presence of an unfamiliar two-talker male speech masker. Children's eye gaze to the target image, distractor image, and female talker was coded every 33 ms off-line by trained observers. Bootstrapped differences of time series (BDOTS) analyses and ternary plots were used to determine differences in visual fixations of the talker between listening conditions in the NH and D/HH groups. Results suggest that the NH group visually fixated the talker more in the masker condition than in quiet. We did not observe statistically discernable differences in visual fixations of the talker between the listening conditions for the D/HH group. Gaze patterns of the NH group in the masker condition looked like gaze patterns of the D/HH group.

Examining the role of external language support and children's own language use in spatial development

This research investigated whether an experimental manipulation providing children with external language support reflects developmental processes whereby children come to use language within spatial tasks. A total of 121 3- to 6-year-old children participated in language production and spatial recall tasks. The Production task measured children's task-relevant descriptions of spatial relations on the testing array. The Recall task assessed children's delayed search for hidden object locations on the testing array relative to one or more spatial reference frames (egocentric, room-centered, and intrinsic). During the Recall task, the experimenter provided children with either descriptive or nondescriptive verbal cues. Results showed that children's task-relevant language production improved with age and the effects of language support on spatial performance decreased with age. However, children's production of task-relevant language did not account for effects of language support. Instead, children benefited from language support irrespective of their task-relevant language production. These results suggest that verbal encoding is not a spontaneous process that young children use in support of their spatial performance. In addition, experimental manipulations of language support are not fully reflective of the ways in which children come to use language within spatial tasks.

New Approach to Intelligence Screening for Children With Global Development Delay Using Eye-Tracking Technology: A Pilot Study

Objective: There has become a consensus for detecting intellectual disability in its early stages and implementing effective intervention. However, there are many difficulties and limitations in the evaluation of intelligence-related scales in low-age children. Eye-tracking technology may effectively solve some of the pain points in the evaluation.

Method: We used an eye-tracking technology for cognitive assessment. The subjects looked at a series of task pictures and short videos, the fixation points of which were recorded by the eye-movement analyzer, and the data were statistically analyzed. A total of 120 children aged between 1.5 and 4 years participated in the study, including 60 typically developing children and 60 children with global development delay, all of whom were assessed via the Bayley scale, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), and Gesell scale.

Results: Cognitive scores from eye-tracking technology are closely related to the scores of neuropsychological tests, which shows that the technique performs well as an early diagnostic test of children's intelligence.

Conclusions: The results show that children's cognitive development can be quickly screened using eye-tracking technology and that it can track quantitative intelligence scores and sensitively detect intellectual impairment.

Speech and Gesture Production Provide Unique Insights Into Young Children's Spatial Reasoning

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old's speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children's Mental Transformation Tasks. Results showed that speech and gesture relevant for solving the trials (disambiguating correct choices) predicted spatial performance when controlling for age, gender, and spatial words and gestures produced. Children performed the spatial tasks well if they produced relevant information either verbally through speech or nonverbally through gesture. These results highlight the importance of not only focusing on concepts children can reference but also on how such concepts are used in spatial tasks.