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Bilingual babies know their grammar by 7 months

Date:
February 14, 2013
Source:
University of British Columbia
Summary:
Babies as young as seven months can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages with vastly different grammatical structures, according to new research.
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Babies as young as seven months can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages with vastly different grammatical structures, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and Université Paris Descartes.

Published February 14 in the journal Nature Communications and presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, the study shows 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.

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

Previous research by Werker and Judit Gervain, a linguist at the Université 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," says Gervain. "But babies growing up bilingual need more than that, so they develop new strategies that monolingual babies don't necessarily need to use."

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


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Materials provided by University of British Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Judit Gervain, Janet F. Werker. Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Nature Communications, 2013; 4: 1490 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2430

Cite This Page:

University of British Columbia. "Bilingual babies know their grammar by 7 months." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 February 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130214111606.htm>.
University of British Columbia. (2013, February 14). Bilingual babies know their grammar by 7 months. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 18, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130214111606.htm
University of British Columbia. "Bilingual babies know their grammar by 7 months." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130214111606.htm (accessed March 18, 2024).

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