Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish‐learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however, rhythmically and phonologically close languages. This raises the possibility that bilinguals only rely on redundant audiovisual cues when their languages are close. To test this possibility, we exposed 15‐month‐old and 4‐ to 6‐year‐old close‐language bilinguals (Spanish/Catalan) and distant‐language bilinguals (Spanish/”other”) to videos of a talker uttering Spanish or Catalan (native) and English (non‐native) monologues and recorded eye‐gaze to the talker's eyes and mouth. At both ages, the close‐language bilinguals attended more to the talker's mouth than the distant‐language bilinguals. This indicates that language proximity modulates selective attention to a talker's mouth during early childhood and suggests that reliance on the greater salience of audiovisual speech cues depends on the difficulty of the speech‐processing task.

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future or hypothetical events. Displacement poses an important challenge for language learning. How can children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available? We suggest that caregivers provide children with iconic vocal and gestural cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents to support displaced learning. We collected an audio-visual corpus of English-speaking caregiver-child interactions (N = 71, 24-58 months, 37 female) and annotated the range of vocal and manual behaviours caregivers produced. We found that caregivers used iconic cues especially in displaced contexts, using other cues when objects were present. Thus, we map caregivers’ non-linguistic behaviours, showing that they provide iconic cues to support displaced language learning and processing.