BENEFITS FOR BABIES EXPOSED TO TWO LANGUAGES
A team of
investigators and clinician-scientists in Singapore and internationally have
found that there are advantages associated with exposure to two languages in
infancy. As part of a long-term birth cohort study of Singaporean mothers and
their offspring called GUSTO -- seminally a tripartite project between A*STAR's
Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), KK Women's and Children's
Hospital (KKH) and the National University Hospital (NUH) -- (see Annex A),
six-month old bilingualinfants recognised familiar images faster than those
brought up in monolingual homes. They also paid more attention to novel images
compared to monolingual infants.
The findings reveal a
generalized cognitive advantage that emerges early in bilingual infants, and is
not specific to a particular language. The findings were published online on 30
July 2014 in the scientific journal, Child Development.
Infants were shown a
coloured image of either a bear or a wolf. For half the group, the bear was
made to become the "familiar" image while the wolf was the
"novel" one, and vice versa for the rest of the group. The study
showed that bilingual babies got bored of familiar images faster than
monolingual babies.
Several previous
studies in the field have shown that the rate at which an infant becomes bored
of a familiar image and subsequent preference for novelty is a common predictor
of better pre-school developmental outcomes, such as advanced performance in
concept formation, non-verbal cognition, expressive and receptive language, and
IQ tests. The past studies showed that babies who looked at the image and then
rapidly get bored, demonstrated higher performance in various domains of
cognition and language later on as children.
Bilingual babies also
stared for longer periods of time at the novel image than their monolingual
counterparts, demonstrating "novelty preference." Other studies in
the field have shown this is linked with improved performance in later IQ and
vocabulary tests during pre-school and school-going years.
Associate Professor
Leher Singh, who is from the Department of Psychology at the National
University of Singapore's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and lead author
of this study said, "One of the biggest challenges of infant research is
data collection. Visual habituation works wonderfully because it only takes a
few minutes and capitalises on what babies do so naturally, which is to rapidly
become interested in something new and then rapidly move on to something else.
Even though it is quite a simple task, visual habituation is one of the few
tasks in infancy that has been shown to predict later cognitive
development."
A bilingual infant
encounters more novel linguistic information than its monolingual peers. A
six-month old infant in a bilingual home is not just learning another language;
it is learning two languages while learning to discern between the two
languages it is hearing. It is possible that since learning two languages at
once requires more information-processing efficiency, the infants have a chance
to rise to this challenge by developing skills to cope with it.
Said Assoc Prof Leher
Singh, "As adults, learning a second language can be painstaking and
laborious. We sometimes project that difficulty onto our young babies,
imagining a state of enormous confusion as two languages jostle for space in
their little heads. However, a large number of studies have shown us that
babies are uniquely well positioned to take on the challenges of bilingual
acquisition and in fact, may benefit from this journey."
In comparison to many
other countries, a large proportion of Singaporean children are born into
bilingual environments. This finding that bilingual input to babies is
associated with cognitive enhancement, suggests a potentially strong
neurocognitive advantage for Singaporean children outside the domain of
language, in processing new information and recognising familiar objects with
greater accuracy.
Said Assoc Prof Chong
Yap Seng, Lead Principal Investigator for GUSTO, "This is good news for
Singaporeans who are making the effort to be bilingual. These findings were
possible because of the unique Singaporean setting of the study and the detailed
neurodevelopmental testing that the GUSTO researchers perform." Assoc Prof
Chong is Senior Consultant, Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology,
National University Hospital (NUH), as well as Acting Executive Director,
Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), Agency for Science,
Technology and Research (A*STAR).
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