S’pore study finds benefits for babies exposed to two languages
SINGAPORE – A team of Singapore and international scientists have found that there are advantages linked to the exposure of infants to two languages.
As part of a long-term birth cohort study of Singaporean mothers and their offspring, six-month-old bilingual infants recognised familiar images faster than those brought up in monolingual homes.
The study – seminally a tripartite project between A*STAR’s Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) and the National University Hospital (NUH) – found that the bilingual infants also paid more attention to novel images compared to monolingual infants.
The findings reveal a generalised cognitive advantage that emerges early in bilingual infants, and is not specific to a particular language.
The infants were shown coloured images of either a bear or a wolf. For half the group, the bear was made to become the “familiar” image while the wolf was the “novel” one, and vice versa for the rest of the group.
The study showed that bilingual babies got bored of familiar images faster than monolingual babies.
Several previous studies in the field have shown that the rate at which an infant becomes bored of a familiar image and subsequent preference for novelty is a common predictor of better pre-school developmental outcomes.
These outcomes include advanced performance in concept formation, non-verbal cognition, expressive and receptive language, and IQ tests.
Source: Asia One
Published: 02 Sep 2014