Original Article on  Live Science,

Having bilingual parents and the experience of hearing two different languages may give babies an early learning advantage even before they know how to speak!

A recent study conducted by Jacques Meler, who is a cognitive neuroscientist at the International School for Advanced studies in Trieste, shows that bilingual babies can quickly get used to different learning cues at seven months old compared with babies who live in single-language homes. The results of the studies may lead researchers to rethink how hearing two languages trains the young brains of babies even before they have learned how to put together words.

Babies from bilingual environments develop early learning advantage skills but this may not automatically mean that they will have higher intelligence later on in their lives. However, it reveals that babies benefit early on from having bilingual exposure, even when they still babble incomprehensible words. The enhancement of these babies’ learning advantage is due more to perception at their young age rather than language production.

Scientists have known since before that babies begin absorbing language fundamentals even before they can speak and that they can tell the difference between the sounds from different languages. Previous researches have also gathered that regularly using two languages improves some thinking processes among children and adults.

The research was designed and conducted by comparing bilingual babies with monolingual babies. Each group had to look at screens in anticipation of visual stimulations with puppets associated with sound cues with the image. In all the experiments, the bilingual babies beat the monolingual babies even when the sound cues changed from nonsense syllable combinations to a structured sound cue and then a visual cue.

The study clearly showed that bilingual babies have an advantage in thinking that involved the so-called executive function which helps regulate abilities such as being able to start and stop actions. The study also indicated that having early bilingual exposure could train the mind in a more general sense rather than just a language-specific sense as some researchers had suggested.

Since the bilingual babies don’t know how to speak yet, no one can attribute the knowledge of two languages to them said Mehler. However, the results of the study do not indicate that the early learning advantage of bilingual babies can translate into better intelligence in later life and it doesn’t deny the possibility that monolingual babies have plenty of opportunities later to exercise executive function.

Exposure to two different languages at an earlier age may enhance the learning advantage of young children. However, if we would want them to become truly fluent with languages, we should encourage them to learn as they grow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Languages and Society, Young Learners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.