Twelve-month old babies understand that foreign languages are not just noise, according to a study by Athena Vouloumanos at New York University.
Babies selectively attend to human speech, and by nine months English L1 babies can distinguish between English, Russian and Spanish due to differences in stress-timing, permissible consonant clusters and vowel sequences.
But do they understand that Russian and Spanish are languages and not just noise?
To find out, Vouloumanos studied sixty-two, 12-monthold English L1 babies. The infants first watched an Englishspeaking Communicator ask for one of two objects, with the Receiver then handing the asked-for object to the Communicator. The babies then watched versions of the same scene with the communication in Russian, Spanish, nonsense, English or humming.
Babies have a sense of the natural order of things, and when that is violated it peaks their interest and they gaze for longer at the scene. In some of the role plays, the Receiver violated the natural order by not giving the Communicator the desired object. In these instances, babies looked longer at the situation in all cases – except when the Communicator hummed the request.
The implication is that the babies understood when language was being used to communicate a request from the Communicator to the Receiver. Humming – even humming the nonsense English request with closed lips – was not seen as communicating anything.
■ Vouloumantos, A. (2018) ‘Voulez-vous jouer avec moi? Twelve-month-olds understand that foreign languages can communicate.’ Cognition 173: 87-92
