When a new colleague of mine heard that I do research with bilingual children, she promptly informed me that she had two of her own. And then she hesitated, saying “Well, they will be bilingual when they’re a bit older”, telling me that they were both under two and didn’t say very much yet, especially the 8-month-old.
Of course there’s nothing unusual about that: most children don’t produce their first word until around the first birthday and first word combinations generally only start around 18 months or so. But does the fact that children can’t say much yet in either language mean that they’re not bilingual?
That depends on your definition of bilingual of course – a can of worms I don’t want to open here – but a couple of weeks ago I came across a study which showed that, and I quote, “the first steps toward bilingual language acquisition have already begun at birth”.
The researchers (Krista Byers-Heinlein, Tracey Burns and Janet Werker) made use of a technique called the “high-amplitude sucking preference procedure”. Essentially, what they do is have newborn babies suck on a teat hooked up to special machinery which measures sucking rate. At the same time as sucking on the teeth, babies listen to language sounds. First, they listen to sounds from one language, and then they hear sounds from a different language. The idea is that if the babies recognise that there’s been a change, they will suck harder. Also, if they are interested in what they hear, they suck harder. The two languages used in this study were English and Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines.
What the researchers in this study showed is that babies whose mothers spoke English during pregnancy preferred listening to English over Tagalog, whereas babies whose mothers spoke English and Tagalog during pregnancy showed an equal preference for both languages. And this wasn’t because they somehow couldn’t distinguish the two – in a separate experiment, the researchers show that newborn babies from the same bilingual population are able to discriminate between English and Tagalog, even though they don’t show a preference for one over the other.
What I find fascinating about this study is not only my amazement at the techniques researchers have developed to find out what newborn babies can or can’t do (see our June feature for more), but just how early children growing up with two languages become sensitive to them. When I was pregnant with my (now 2-year-old) daughter, I spoke both English and Dutch, but definitely more English than Dutch. I wonder whether she would have shown the same sensitivity as the children whose mothers spoke more Dutch than English? And what about children whose mothers speak three languages … ?! More research would be needed to answer those questions. One thing’s for sure, though, if the results of this particular study are anything to go by, my colleague can definitely say her two young children are bilingual, even if they don’t say much yet!
The study is reported here: Byers-Heinlein, Krista, Burns, Tracey C., Werker, Janet F. (2010) The roots of bilingualism in newborns. Psychological Science 21: 343-348.
See also reports on Psychology Today and Anthropologist in the Attic.