Bilingual Babies Get an Early Edge

Jeremy Hsu, Staff Writer, LiveScience.com

Bilingual parents and the experience of hearing two

languages may give babies an early learning advantage -

and all before they know how to speak.

A new study shows that bilingual babies quickly adapt to

different learning cues at seven months old compared with

babies from single-language households. The findings

may lead researchers to rethink how hearing two

languages trains the young brain, even before babies

have learned how to formulate words.

This early learning advantage may not necessarily 

translate into higher intelligence later on in life. But it does

reveal that babies benefit early on from having bilingual

exposure, when they themselves still babble nonsense.

"We believe that the enhancement is due more to

perception at this age, rather than [language] production,"

said Jacques Mehler, a cognitive neuroscientist at the

International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy.

Scientists have known that babies begin absorbing some

language fundamentals before they can speak, and that

babies can tell the difference between sounds from two

sufficiently different languages. Previous studies have

also shown that regularly using two languages improves

some thinking processes among both children and adults. 

However, few if any other studies have compared the

cognitive functions of bilingual and monolingual babies at

a very young age. Mehler and fellow researcher Agnes

Kovacs recruited "crib bilinguals" from families in the

Trieste area of Italy, where parents spoke to infants from

birth using both Italian and Slovenian mother tongues.

The researchers taught bilingual and monolingual babies

to look at one side of a screen in anticipation of a visual

"reward" image of a puppet, after the infants first learned

to associate a sound cue with the image. The visual treat

 was then switched to the other side of the screen, so

that researchers could see how quickly babies would

learn to switch their anticipatory look to that other side.

Bilingual babies beat out monolingual babies in three such

experiments, even when the sound cues changed from

nonsense syllable combinations to a structured sound

cue, and then a visual cue. In all three cases, bilingual

babies soon learned to switch their anticipatory attention

to the other side of the screen, whereas monolingual

babies never adapted.

This clearly showed a bilingual baby advantage in thinking

that involved so-called executive function, which helps

regulate abilities such as being able to start and stop

actions. It 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.

"These babies don't know how to speak yet," Mehler told

LiveScience. "No one can attribute knowledge of two

languages to them."

Whether this early learning advantage translates into later

benefits for bilingual babies remains uncertain. Mehler

pointed out that enhanced executive function does not

necessarily translate into better intelligence - and in any

case, monolingual babies have plenty of opportunities

later to exercise executive function.

"My conclusion is that it's a very particular component of

our cognitive toolbox, and early learning certainly has no

negative effect," Melher said. But despite suggestions

from other researchers, he personally doubted whether

such early bilingual training leads to improved IQ or better

test scores.

Full study results appear in the April 13 issue of the

journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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