Bilingual Babies

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jefollis/Podcasts/Final2Podcast.mp3?ticket=t_ra0TmH4V

It was once believed that children would grow up with "language confusion" if raised in bilingual homes, but recent research conducted at the University of Washington shows that infants can actually differentiate between languages. In addition to these findings, there are benefits to this childhood environment. Because of this exposure, bilingual children grow up with highly developed mental skills, and even have "more cognitive flexibility" than monolingual children.

This podcast is based on Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language by Perri Klass M.D. Published on October 11, 2011 in the New York Times, both in print and online.

Produced by Colleen Buss, Amanda Adreani, Sara Rosario and Sneha Shukla.

At the University of Washington, researchers compared the brain scan results from a group of bilingual infants to a group of monolingual infants to understand their reaction to hearing multiple languages.

Before the study, scientists were able to analyze how infants respond to stimulants such as familiar noise or movement.

On researching, It was observed that before 10 months, both groups of infants could identify different spoken sounds when exposed to different languages.

Whereas, bilingual infants followed a different developmental path— after 10 months they still recognize multiple languages.

As times goes by, these children have higher levels of mental processing which gives them better skills in problem solving and multitasking.

So watch what you're saying around your babies. They can probably understand better than you think!