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 06 July 2008 03:18 BST

Secrets of babies' language skills

Friday, 25 May 2007 11:03
Babies from bilingual homes use visual clues for language

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Babies aged just four months are able to tell if a speaker has switched to a different language using visual clues alone, new research claims today.

Scientists have already discovered that babies can identify different languages from sounds, but the new study from the University of British Columbia claims to be the first to discover the use of visual clues.

It found that infants are able to tell when a different language is spoken by watching the shapes and rhythm of the speaker's mouth and movements.

Children who grow up in households where one language is spoken lose this ability, but those in bilingual environments maintain the discrimination abilities needed for separating and learning multiple languages.

The researchers tested three groups of infants aged four, six and eight months from monolingual English homes and two groups of infants aged six and eight months from bilingual homes.

Each group was shown silent video clips of three bilingual French-English speakers, who recited sentences first in English or French, and then switched to the other language.

Babies aged six months from both bilingual French-English and monolingual English homes could tell the languages apart visually and would watch the videos for a significantly longer period if the speaker switched languages.

But by eight months only babies from a bilingual French-English home and familiar with both languages were able to tell the languages apart visually.

"This suggests that by eight months only babies learning more than one language need to maintain this ability," the study, published in the journal Science, says.

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