Babies are sponges — they can learn up to three different languages simultaneously. According to a new study, it’s important to take advantage of this ability: Infants who grow up speaking two or more languages show more “cognitive control” than their monolingual counterparts.
Scientists at the Hungarian Institute for Psychology gave a group of 7-month-old babies a simple test: First, they trained the babies to associate a reward — a puppet, appearing at the same spot on a computer screen — with a particular sound. All of the babies learned to direct their gaze to the correct spot. But when the scientists moved the puppet to the opposite side of the screen, bilingual babies took far less time to adjust. The scientists speculate that bilingual babies, who are forced to deal with “inconsistent input” from the get-go, develop significantly increased powers of concentration, which give them a distinct advantage by the time preschool rolls around.
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