{"id":107,"date":"2020-02-28T19:41:54","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T19:41:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-esc-introtocollegereadingandwriting\/?post_type=chapter&p=107"},"modified":"2020-08-06T17:37:20","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T17:37:20","slug":"bilingual-babies-ignites-infants-learning","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-esc-introtocollegereadingandwriting\/chapter\/bilingual-babies-ignites-infants-learning\/","title":{"raw":"Bilingual Babies Ignites Infants' Learning","rendered":"Bilingual Babies Ignites Infants’ Learning"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\nby Molly McElroy<\/em> [1]<\/sup>\r\nused with permission<\/em>\r\n
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\"\"Many brain studies show that bilingual adults have more activity in areas associated with executive function, a set of mental abilities that includes problem-solving, shifting attention and other desirable cognitive traits.<\/p>\r\nNow new findings reveal that this bilingualism-related difference in brain activity is evident as early as 11 months of age, just as babies are on the verge of producing their first words.\r\n\r\n\u201cOur results suggest that before they even start talking, babies raised in bilingual households are getting practice at tasks related to executive function,\u201d said Naja Ferjan Ram\u00edrez, lead author and a research scientist at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS<\/a>) at the University of Washington.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis suggests that bilingualism shapes not only language development, but also cognitive development more generally,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nThe study also gives evidence that the brains of babies from bilingual families remain more open to learning new language sounds, compared with babies from monolingual families.\r\n\r\nThe study was published online<\/a>\u00a0April 4\u00a0in Developmental Science and will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal.\r\n\r\n\"\"\r\n\r\n\u201cMonolingual babies show a narrowing in their perception of sounds at about 11 months of age\u2014they no longer discriminate foreign-language sounds they successfully discriminated at 6 months of age,\u201d said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut babies raised listening to two languages seem to stay \u2018open\u2019 to the sounds of novel languages longer than their monolingual peers, which is a good and highly adaptive thing for their brains to do,\u201d Kuhl said.\r\n\r\nThe researchers used magnetoencephalography (MEG<\/u><\/a>), which measures magnetic changes given off by active nerve cells. Unlike other brain-imaging methods, MEG can precisely pinpoint both the timing and location of activity in the brain.\r\n\r\nThe study is the first to use MEG to do whole-brain analyses comparing activation patterns in response to speech sounds in babies raised in monolingual and bilingual households.\r\n\r\nIn the experiment, 16 11-month-old babies\u2014eight from English-only households and\u00a0eight from Spanish-English households, and an even mix of demographic factors such as the family\u2019s socioeconomic status\u2014sat in a highchair beneath the helmet-like MEG scanner.\r\n\r\nThe babies listened to an 18-minute stream of speech sounds, such as \u201cda\u2019s\u201d and \u201cta\u2019s.\u201d The stream included sounds specific to English or Spanish, and sounds shared by the two languages. (See a video<\/a> of the experimental set-up).\r\n\r\nThe researchers compared monolingual and bilingual babies\u2019 brain responses to the language sounds. The most obvious difference they saw was in two brain regions associated with executive function, the prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex. In these regions, the Spanish-English bilingual babies had stronger brain responses to speech sounds, compared with English-only babies.\r\n\r\nThe findings align with brain studies in bilingual and monolingual adults, Ferjan Ram\u00edrez said. The boost bilingualism gives to executive function areas in the brain could arise from bilinguals needing to switch back and forth between languages, allowing them to routinely practice and improve executive function skills.\r\n\r\nOther brain evidence from the study should be a relief for parents wondering if their bilingual baby is learning enough language:\r\n