Babies hearing foreign speech pick up languages faster

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2008-05-11 19:03:53  

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British researchers have found that babies who hear foreign speech in their first nine months of life find it easier to pick up languages in school or as adults, according to a local press report Sunday.(Xinhua Photo)

LONDON, May 11 (Xinhua) -- British researchers have found that babies who hear foreign speech in their first nine months of life find it easier to pick up languages in school or as adults, according to a local press report Sunday.

Psychologists at Bristol University found that the developing brain undergoes a period of "programming" in infancy which sets up for life its ability to recognize key sounds in whatever will become its native language, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

This process helps the brain make sense of speech by filtering out sounds not used in the native language, but also makes it harder to recognize unfamiliar sounds from foreign languages, the researchers said, adding crucially, babies exposed to multiple languages during their first few months retain the ability to recognize sounds from all the languages they hear.

"When a baby is born, it has the capacity to distinguish every type of speech sound. Even if the parents are English, the baby has the capacity to distinguish Greek and Chinese vowel sounds. By six months an infant can only recognize vowels from its native language, and within another two or three months the same happens to consonant sounds. So within around nine to 10 months, a baby's universal language ability is reduced to its native language," Nina Kazanina, an expert in linguistic psychology at Bristol, said.

Kazanina explained that this happens because the brain is trying to make sense of sounds used in speech in the context of the native language, and so applies a kind of filter to help make it easier to understand words.

Using techniques that measure the levels and location of electrical activity in the brain in response to different speech sounds, Kazanina found that while Irish Gaelic speakers generated two separate states of activity when listening to hard and soft "k" and "g" sounds, English speakers only generated a single state of activity to both sounds, as they were unable to detect the subtle differences.

"While this is useful for the native language, it can have a rather sad effect when it comes to learning foreign languages. Foreign sounds are often categorized using the native language filter and can lead to misperception," she said.

The expert believed this explains why English speakers struggle to learn French compared with Italian and Spanish speakers, who have more similar sounds in their native tongues.

But the effect can work in the opposite direction too, according to Kananina, who said English speakers find it far easier to pronounce Russian vowels than Russians do English vowels because English has more vowel sounds, so those who speak it have a broader repertoire.

In a similar way, Japanese and Chinese speakers are unable to tell the difference between "r" and "l", so get them confused when speaking English, she said.

According to the report, the British research was supported by a separate study at the University of Washington which also showed that speaking different languages to babies in their early lives can be crucial in helping them learn new languages later in life. In the U.S. study, researchers found that babies who were spoken to in Chinese for just one hour a week found it easier to recognize Chinese speech when they were older.