Overview

Human babies might look all physically brittle and helpless when they are born, but they are gifted with some amazing mental abilities that help them see through those initial challenging years. One of those abilities is their power to absorb new knowledge in the form of language, and a new study has proven that the earlier babies are exposed to a second knowledge, the smarter they are in their later years.

The science and other stuff to know

To put their claims to the test, Naja Ferjan Ramírez, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington (WU), and her team conducted the study on sixteen 11-month-old babies. The researchers relied on magnetoencephalography (MEG) to analyze the magnetic changes given off by active nerve cells, the study explained. What makes MEG unique from other magnetic imaging techniques is the precision with which it can detect the timing and location of activities underway in the brain.

Eight of the babies belonged to English-only households, while the others were from Spanish-English households. They were made to listen to various speech sounds that included sounds specific to individual languages as well as those common to both languages.

The findings suggested that the most notable responses came from the two brain regions associated with executive function — the prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex. And the babies coming from bilingual households had stronger responses to speech sounds, compared with English-only babies.

Ramírez stated in a WU press release that the results indicated that babies raised in bilingual households were getting practice at tasks related to executive function, even before they started talking.

Co-author Patricia Kuhl said monolingual babies exhibited a limited perception of sounds at 11 months of age. However, bilingual babies continued to be responsive to the sounds of other languages “longer than their monolingual peers, which is a good and highly adaptive thing for their brains to do”, she added.

“This suggests that bilingualism shapes not only language development, but also cognitive development more generally,” Ramírez said.

So what?

The findings offer key insights for child behaviorists as well as parents on how to encourage mental development in babies for long-term cognitive functionality. Bilingualism forces babies to switch back and forth between languages, challenging their executive function and helping them practice and improve executive function skills.

The study also put worries to rest about two languages having a toll on a child’s learning. Results indicated that bilingual babies displayed neural responsiveness to both English and Spanish sounds, proving that they were learning both languages. They also exhibited no change whatsoever in the rate of learning English as their monolingual babies.

What’s next?

The findings could certainly aid parents, school management, and policymakers to incorporate bilingual training in children’s learning journey as early as possible and to help boost children’s executive functions and cognitive learning.

“The 11-month-old baby brain is learning whatever language or languages are present in the environment and is equally capable of learning two languages as it is of learning one language,” Ramírez said.

They say the child’s mind is a blank canvas. As adults, it is our responsibility to give them the tools to make that canvas as colorful as they possibly can. An early introduction to a second language could be one of those magical tools that make the child more aware, more confident, and more articulate in later years.