Bilingual infants’ social engagement in a diglossic situation in Martinique: The effect of language status

Résumé 0

This article compares the social engagement of infants aged between two and five months when their mother sings them a song in French and when she sings to them in Creole in a naturalistic setting in Martinique (French West Indies). Our main hypothesis is that infants will show greater social engagement when the mother sings in French because of the diglossic situation in Martinique, where the French language has a higher status than the Creole language. The infants’ level of social engagement was measured using two complementary methods: a microanalysis of video recordings and an evaluation of video sequences by naive observers. The microanalytic approach shows that infants are as engaged in both situations but that, when sung a creole song, they switch their gaze more often between their mother and their surroundings and are more frequently rocked by their mothers to the rhythm of the song. Analysis of the naive observers’ evaluations shows that infants are perceived as more socially engaged in the French song situation. Thus, this study suggests there is a link between the language the mother sings in and the organization of mother-infant interaction, but no clear manifestation of early language bias in infants.