Babies And Languages
(WHITNEY M. WEIKUM)
As many parent will attest, babies are amazing. And to add to list of remarkable things they can do, here is a new one;they can distinguish one language from another just by sight of a talking face and not sound.
A doctoral student in the neuro- science at the university of british columbia, and colleagues made this discovery in test of infants up to 8 months old from monolingual and bilingual household.
The researchers showed silent videotapes of bilingual speaker saying a sentence in English or French until the baby got bored and look away .They followed that with a tape of the speaker saying the same sentence in other and observed whether that caught the attention of the baby, indicating that the baby recognised a difference and was attracted to something new.
They report in the journal science that 4and 6 months old infant from English -only household were able to tell that a different language was being spoken.By contrast,8months old bilingual households could still determinate between languages.The researcher shows that infants have the power to process all kinds of cues.From a very young age , they are capable of taking in a lot language information.
Similar experiment with adults have shown that they can use visual cues to discriminate between two languages if they know one of the languages.
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