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Bilingual babies know grammar by 7 months
Friday February 15, 2013 05:02:07 PM,
IANS
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Toronto: Babies can
differentiate between two languages and begin to learn them with
vast, different grammatical structures, even at seven months, says
a new research.
The study shows that infants in bilingual environments use pitch
and duration cues to discriminate between languages - such as
English and Japanese - with opposite word orders.
In English, a function word comes before a content word (the dog,
his hat, with friends, for example) and the duration of the
content word is longer, while in Japanese or Hindi, the order is
reversed, and the pitch of the content word higher, the journal
Nature Communications reports.
"By as early as seven months, babies are sensitive to these
differences and use these as cues to tell the languages apart,"
said University of British Columbia (UBC) psychologist Janet
Werker, study co-author.
Previous research by Werker and Judit Gervain, linguist at the
Universite Paris Descartes, France, and co-author of the new
study, showed that babies use frequency of words in speech to
discern their significance, according to an UBC statement.
"For example, in English the words 'the' and 'with' come up a lot
more frequently than other words - they're essentially learning by
counting," said Gervain.
"But babies growing up bilingual need more than that, so they
develop new strategies that monolingual babies don't necessarily
need to use."
"If you speak two languages at home, don't be afraid, it's not a
zero-sum game," said Werker.
"Your baby is very equipped to keep these languages separate and
they do so in remarkable ways."
These findings were presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in
Boston.
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