Testing infants from four to eight months old on silent video clips of people alternatively speaking French and English — the two main languages in Canada — researcher Whitney Weikum from the University of British Columbia discovered that visual clues alone would make even the youngest pay closer attention and watch longer if a speaker changed languages.

Six-month-old babies, even those from monolingual homes, could discern the different languages visually, according to a summary of the research, to be published in the May 25 issue of Science.

But by eight months, babies from single-language homes could no longer tell the difference by looking alone, though those from bilingual homes could still tell from facial cues.

"We already know that babies can tell languages apart using auditory cues," said Weikum, a UBC neuroscience doctoral student who worked on the study with psychology professor Janet Werker.

"But this is the first study to show that young babies are prepared to tell languages apart using only visual information."

The results of the study — which tested five groups of infants from monolingual English and bilingual English-French homes — demonstrated that babies growing up in a bilingual environment "advantageously maintain the discrimination abilities needed for separating and learning multiple languages," the summary said.

But Weikum said the results on the oldest infants show that "by eight months, only babies learning more than one language need to maintain this ability".

"Babies who only hear and see one language don’t need this ability, and their sensitivity to visual language information from other languages declines."

Via: iafrica