A bilingual advantage has been found in prosody understanding in pre-school children. To understand this advantage better, we asked 73 children (6-8 years) to identify the emotional valence of spoken words, based on either semantics or emotional prosody (which were either consistent or discrepant with each other). Bilingual experience ranged from no to equal exposure to and use of two languages. Both age and bilingual experience predicted accurate identification of prosody, particularly for trials where the semantics were discrepant with the targeted prosody. Bilingual experience, but not age, predicted a prosodic bias, meaning that participants had more difficulty ignoring the irrelevant discrepant prosody when the task was to identify the semantics of the word. The decline of a semantic bias was predicted by age and bilingual experience together. Our results suggest that previous findings on the bilingual advantage in prosody processing may in fact be driven by a prosodic bias.

We examined developmental differences in smooth pursuit eye tracking proficiency in a large sample of preadolescent, adolescent, and adult males. Smooth pursuit was quantified using general measures of oculomotor functioning and by examining the frequency and dynamic characteristics of specific saccadic events. Examination of age effects using general measures indicated that, by late adolescence, the smooth pursuit system reached adult levels of functioning. No significant differences were found between the adolescent and adult groups on most global measures. However, both groups had better eye tracking than the preadolescent group, suggesting that during preadolescence the oculomotor system is still developing and is not yet capable of optimal performance. Examination of the frequency and dynamic characteristics of the saccadic events yielded additional information regarding the nature of the smooth pursuit eye tracking differences of the three age groups.