Page 9 - ELG2307 Jul Issue 485

NEWS

Bilingual babies

Babies unfazed by language switching.

By Gillian Ragsdale builds on previous research just hearing the spoken
Bilingual babies are not confused showing that even new-borns can language, in the first
when individual speakers switch distinguish between two different study, infants looked at
languages, according to new spoken languages. a field of flowers while
research from Esther Schott and Bilingual infants were routinely listening to the trials,
colleagues at Concordia University, exposed to at least 25% English or but in the second study,
Montreal, Canada. French, while monolingual infants they saw a picture of
Families raising bilingual were exposed to at least 90% the speaker.
children often try to assign English or French. For the studies, An analysis of
languages to particular speakers infants sat on their parent’s the infants’ eye gaze
(the “one-person-one-language” lap facing a screen with an eye including pupil dilation,
approach), or at least have tracker to record data on eye gaze. which can reflect
individuals speak consistently Infants then listened to passages cognitive processing,
in one language for spells of from “The Little Prince” in either showed no response
time or in certain contexts. This French or English with eight to language switching
accords with popular wisdom that familiarization trials and four test from either monolingual
children associate languages with trials. In the familiarization phase, or bilingual infants, whether given REFERENCE
the speaker and will be confused the two speakers, one male and auditory or audio-visual input. n Liu Schott, E., Tamayo, M. P.
if they keep switching languages. one female, consistently spoke in Previous research has established and Byers-Heinlein, K. (2023)
To test this, Schott and either English or French. In the that infants can easily discriminate Keeping track of language: Can
colleagues carried out two studies test trials, two trials had the same between English and French and monolingual and bilingual infants
with 84 monolingual and bilingual person-language pairings but in between male and female speakers – associate a speaker with the language
infants aged 5, 12 and 18 months the other two trials the languages but the lack of response implies no they speaker? Inf Child Dev e2403
to see if they distinguished were switched. cognitive incongruity or confusion https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2403
between different speakers and To test whether audio-visual – was experienced during the
the languages they spoke. This cues were more influential than language switching.

MA TESOL

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latest developments in TESOL theory and
practice to improve your career prospects.

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