Babies learning languages

[Al-khiyal]

25 May, 2007 -- Four-month-old babies can discriminate between different languages merely by studying the facial movements of the speaker, according to a pioneering study of speech development in infants.

Even with the sound turned off on a video recording, babies were able to tell whether someone had switched from speaking English to speaking French, the scientists who conducted the study found.

The researchers believe that this "visual speech" ability is a critical component of language learning and is something that is retained for longer in babies brought up in bilingual homes who learn two languages at once.

Babies are acutely tuned in to the human face and can even recognise basic facial features at birth. The latest study demonstrates just how important facial movements are to language learning, the scientists report in the journal Science.

"Talking faces are among the most dynamic and salient stimuli available to infants, and the facial movements accompanying speech influence adult and infant speech perception," said Whitney Weikum, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia in Canada and lead author of the study.

Apart from the sounds made by a talking face, babies appear to be able to use the movements to determine whether someone has switched from one language to another, Ms Weikum said.

"We already know that babies can tell languages apart using auditory cues. But this is the first study to show that young babies are prepared to tell languages apart using only visual information," she said.

The study was based on three groups of infants from monolingual, English-speaking families at different ages of life - four, six and eight months. Two other groups of infants of the same ages, but this time from bilingual English-French families, were also used.

The scientists showed each group silent video clips of three bilingual French-English speakers who recited sentences first in English or French, and then switched to the other language, Ms Weikum said.

The young age groups, at four and six months, from both monolingual and bilingual homes were able to tell the languages apart, based on the fact that they would watch the clips for significantly longer periods if the speaker switched language.

However, at eight months of age, the babies from the monolingual homes appeared to lose this ability. Yet the babies from bilingual families were still able to tell each language apart based on the visual information alone. "This suggests that by eight months, only babies learning more than one language need to maintain this ability," Ms Weikum said.

"Babies who only hear and see one language don't need this ability, and their sensitivity to visual language information from other languages declines," she said.

The study concluded that young babies needed to use "visual speech" as part of the language-learning process, but they lost this as they got older because the auditory aspect becomes more important.

But bilingual babies kept this ability for visual speech for longer because of the extra effort which was needed to discriminate between the two languages they were learning. "Traditionally, visual speech has been regarded as a redundant signal in verbal communication. The present research shows that visual speech information alone is sufficient for language discrimination in infancy," Ms Weikum said.

Babies can tell languages apart by facial expression

[Al-khiyal]

August 3, 2007 -- Out of the mouths of babes spurts a rush of words, at least once they reach their second year. Now mathematics may finally explain why.

A sudden explosion in a child's vocabulary usually strikes at around 18 months, with usage expanding dramatically to include more complex words, but scientists have previously failed to provide a convincing explanation.

Writing in the US journal Science, psychologist Bob McMurray, at the University of Iowa, shows that the rapid improvement is an inevitable consequence of the way languages are structured.

Between birth and adulthood, children learn around 60,000 words, an average of 8-10 a day. Studies of word usage by infants show that while a smattering of easy words, such as "hi" and "bye" are grasped by 12 months, just four months later, their lexicon has often broadened substantially to balls, dogs, birds and bottles, babies, books and shoes.

According to Dr McMurray, the reason lies in statistics. In almost every language studied, there are relatively few very easy words and far more moderate and harder words to learn. Easy words tend to be nouns that can be quickly linked to an object, such as a cup or a cat. Harder words include verbs or conceptual terms.

Dr McMurray believes that children's brains start trying to master a huge range of words at once. They learn the easiest most quickly, but a few months later their brains have had longer to grasp tougher words, of which there are far more. "Children are going to get that word spurt, guaranteed, mathematically," he said.

In the study, he calculated statistical distributions of word difficulty and found that nearly 4,000 words could be mastered in less than a quarter of the time it takes a person to learn their first 1,500 words.

"They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion," Dr McMurray said.

At around 12 months old, slightly more than half of children will be using words such as "mummy", "daddy", "hi" and "bye", but little else. Four months later, nearly 70% will use "ball" and "baby", and more than 50% will have mastered words such as "bottle", "bird", "balloon", "eye" and "book". By two years old, the vocabulary has expanded even more rapidly to include a mix of verbs and adjectives, such as "open", "dirty" and "wet".

Psychologist explains secret of children's word explosion

[Bent_Bladi]

Haha! So that's saying, if I want my little cousins to pay attention to me, all I have to do is confuse the heck out of them by switching languages? No candy bribery necessary?? Awesome!!

[amalgamate]

By two years old, the vocabulary has expanded even more rapidly to include a mix of verbs and adjectives, such as "open", "dirty" and "wet".

A mix of verbs?? wow. well... i wish my little nephew could say some of them adjectives between his tata's and napata lum pum ra- naka's.

actually why am i worried? my little one's a lot more advanced than them 50 or so percent of todlers they claim.. sure, he be using interjections!

'Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahh!!'


so there...

[arwen832]

Bonjour,

Je suis en Master 2 et je rédige un mémoire sur le bilinguisme. J'aurais besoin de témoignages de parents élevant leurs enfants dans le bilinguisme (que ce soit un succès ou non), ou au contraire refusant de les élever dans le bilinguisme. Est-ce que quelqu'un serait intéressé pour remplir mon questionnaire? Si oui, vous pouvez me contacter directement par email.

Je vous remercie par avance!

Florie

[Al-khiyal]

Talking to your baby boosts its brainpower

March 25, 2010 -- Researchers have found that even before children begin to speak, words play an important role in their brain development. And for three month old babies, words influence their thinking better than any other kinds of sounds, including musical tones. The study by Northwestern University in Illinois found that babies who heard words were able to categorise them, whereas babies who heard just simple tone noises did not.

Almost 50 three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired with either words or beeps. Infants in the word group were told, for example, "Look at the toma!" - a made up word for fish, as they looked at each picture, said the researchers. Infants in the other group heard a series of beeps which were matched to the word phrases for tone and duration. Then infants were shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side-by-side as the researchers measured how long they looked at each picture. If the infants formed the category, they would look longer at one picture than the other.

Dr Susan Hespos, associate professor of psychology at the university and one of the authors of the study, said the results were "striking". She said: "We found that although infants who heard in the word and tone groups saw exactly the same pictures for exactly the same amount of time, those who heard words formed the category fish and those who heard tones did not. For infants as young as three months of age, words exert a special influence that supports the ability to form a category and these findings offer the earliest evidence to date for a link between words and object categories."

Co-author Professor Sandra Waxman, also from the psychology department, added: "We suspect that human speech, and perhaps especially infant-directed speech, engenders in young infants a kind of attention to the surrounding objects that promotes categorisation. We proposed that over time, this general attentional effect would become more refined, as infants begin to cull individual words from fluent speech, to distinguish among individual words and kinds of words, and to map those words to meaning." The research will appear in the April edition of the journal Child Development.