Language development starts in womb: study
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/02/2010 (5832 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Babies who hear two languages while in the womb are already well on the path to bilingualism, suggests a new study by Canadian researchers.
The study, carried out by psychological scientists at the University of British Columbia, found language acquisition takes root even before birth, months before babies begin to even understand or speak their first word.
"Babies are listening to language very, very early in life," said Janet Werker, co-author of the study and a psychology professor.
The study examined newborns with bilingual mothers who spoke both languages regularly during pregnancy. They found not only are bilingual babies interested in hearing both their native languages, but they can also tell the two languages apart.
"This gives them a leg up at getting started at bilingual language acquisition," said Werker.
The study involved two experiments with two groups of mother-newborn pairs: The mothers of one group had spoken only English while pregnant, while the others spoke both English and Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines.
During the first experiment, newborns heard 10 minutes of speech that alternated every minute between English and Tagalog. But the researchers needed a method to determine the babies’ response to different languages.
"If you want to ask questions of newborn babies, they don’t answer them very well," Werker laughed. She said, however, that the sucking reflex of a newborn baby is very well developed at birth and can be used to determine interest in a stimulus.
Scientists connected a pacifier to a computer to record sucking activity. The computer counted the number of strong sucks per minute when each baby heard either language. On average, monolingual English babies gave more strong sucks per minute when hearing English, while bilingual babies gave the same number of sucks upon hearing both languages.
Werker said many bilingual parents are concerned that if they speak two languages, their children are going to be language-delayed or confused — but this research refutes that notion. The study will be published in the March edition of the journal Psychological Science.
— Canwest News Service