Babies can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages within seven months

Updated on: Monday, February 18, 2013

Babies as young as seven months can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages with vastly different grammatical structures, according to new research.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and Universite Paris Descartes found that infants in bilingual environments use pitch and duration cues to discriminate between languages - such as English and Japanese - with opposite word orders.

In English, a function word comes before a content word (the dog, his hat, with friends, for example) and the duration of the content word is longer, while in Japanese or Hindi, the order is reversed, and the pitch of the content word higher.

UBC psychologist Janet Werker, co-author of the study said, "By as early as seven months, babies are sensitive to these differences and use these as cues to tell the languages apart."

Previous research by Werker and Judit Gervain, a linguist at the Universite Paris Descartes and co-author of the new study, showed that babies use frequency of words in speech to discern their significance.

"For example, in English the words 'the' and 'with' come up a lot more frequently than other words - they're essentially learning by counting," said Gervain.

"But babies growing up bilingual need more than that, so they develop new strategies that monolingual babies don't necessarily need to use," Gervain said in a statement.

"If you speak two languages at home, don't be afraid, it's not a zero-sum game. Your baby is very equipped to keep these languages separate and they do so in remarkable ways," Werker added.

Babies can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages within seven months

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