We’ve all heard that it’s easier to teach a child a second language from a young age and many parents are now raising their children to be proficient in more than one language.

 

It seems that there’s certainly some truth in the old adage "younger is better" when it comes to teaching your child a second language.

 

Researchers have recently discovered the babies can differentiate between words from two different languages at just 20 months old - those little clever clogs!

 

The new research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences determined infants’ propensity to monitor and control language through a series of experiments.

 

24 French-English children participated in the experiment where they were shown pairs of photographs of familiar objects and listened to sentences in both a single language (“Find the dog!”) and a mixture of two languages (“Find the chien!”).

 

 

In a second test, children heard a variety of language switches during sentences which are regularly spoken by children in bilingual households i.e. “That one looks fun! Le chien!”

 

Using eye-tracking monitors, researchers were able to determine how hard the children’s brains needed to work to understand what was going on in the photographs they were being shown.

 

They found that when the children heard the language switches, their pupils immediately dilated, showing they understood the phrases, according to The Independent.

 

Pupil diameter is an involuntary response to how hard the brain is "working," and is used as an indirect measure of cognitive effort in research.

 

The children tested did not need any additional time to process the switches from one language to another.

 

 

To test the efficacy of this experiment, researchers carried out the same tests involving language switches using the same photographs and eye-tracking measures with adults as a control group.

 

Study co-author Casey Lew-Williams said they found that both bilingual adults and infants incur a processing ‘cost’ when they hear code switches, meaning that rather than demonstrating a barrier to understanding, those tested boasted an “efficient processing strategy where there is activation and prioritisation of the currently heard language”.

 

He added: "The children do not think that 'dog' and 'chien' (French) are just two versions of the same thing.They implicitly know that these words belong to different languages".

 

These findings will no doubt reassure parents who are concerned that raising their child in a bilingual home could cause confusion.

 

Do you have a bilingual child? Let us know your thoughts on these new findings.

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