Flexibility of the bi-lingual brain
August 30th 2011 22:33
The brains of babies raised in bilingual households are "flexible" to different languages longer, especially if they hear a lot of language at home, according to a new study from the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.
"The bilingual brain is fascinating because it reflects humans' abilities for flexible thinking - bilingual babies learn that objects and events in the world have two names, and flexibly switch between these labels, giving the brain lots of good exercise," said study co-author Patricia Kuhl.
In the study, babies from monolingual English- or Spanish-speaking households and babies from bilingual English-and-Spanish-speaking households wore caps fitted with electrodes to measure their brain activity. The babies listened to background speech sounds in one language, and a contrasting speech sound in the other language would occasionally be played.
If the brain detects a contrasting sound, the brain lights up with a signature pattern called the mismatch response.
Monolingual babies aged six to nine months showed the mismatch response for English and Spanish contrasting sounds, but by the time they were 10 to 12 months old, they only responded to the sound in their language and could no longer detect the contrasting sound in the other language.
But bilingual babies aged 10 to 12 months still showed the mismatch response for sounds in both languages, suggesting that the bilingual brain remains flexible to languages for a longer period of time, perhaps because bilingual babies are exposed to more speech sounds at home, the authors found.
"When the brain is exposed to two languages rather than only one, the most adaptive response is to stay open longer before showing the perceptual narrowing that monolingual infants typically show at the end of the first year of life," co-author Adrian Garcia-Sierra said.
The study was published this month in the Journal of Phonetics
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