11.3: Early Communication with Eye Gaze

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Todd LaMarr

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The Importance of Eye Gaze

Infants and toddlers learn language best through face-to-face interactions with their caregivers in social contexts, and face-to-face communication is inherently multimodal as it uses more than just speech to communicate (e.g., gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze, etc.,). Eye gaze is, in fact, a central element in human communication. Not only do adults often use social eye gaze when communicating with infants, but infants also show a sensitivity to, and preference for, eye gaze signals early on (Simpson et al., 2020). Newborns look longer at faces with open eyes than faces with closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000). They also prefer faces with direct gaze with which they can engage in mutual eye contact (Farroni, Johnson & Csibra, 2004). Infants begin developing gaze-following abilities between 2 to 4 months, which become fairly stable by 6 to 8 months (D'Entremont et al., 1997; Gredeback et al., 2010). Following gaze cues becomes almost automatic, with adult's gaze direction causing fast visual attention shifts even in infants as young as 3 months of age (Hood et al., 1998).

Father and daughter both looking in the same direction — Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Demonstration of Eye Gaze. (^{^[1]})

There is a strong association between infants' ability to follow an adult's gaze direction, and their later receptive and expressive vocabulary (Çetinçelik, Rowland & Snijders, 2020). Eye gaze, both in the form of eye contact and gaze following, may direct and help infants in sustaining their attention and thus learn about relevant information in the environment. For example, when an infant follows an adult’s gaze to the sky toward an airplane overhead, the sounds produced by the airplane and the language the adult uses while communicating in the moment about the airplane can be more easily linked to the airplane itself. The use of eye gaze cues support infants' learning by highlighting the important information in the environment and channeling their attention to it. ^{^[1]}

^{^[1]} Image by Zach Vessels on Unsplash

^{^[2]} Çetinçelik et al., (2020). Do the eyes have it? A systematic review on the role of eye gaze in infant language development. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. CC by 4.0