Elly the Reindeer

February 17, 2010

New Research shows that bilingualism develops even during pregnancy

aps.jpgAccording to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, infants born to bilingual mothers (who spoke both languages regularly during pregnancy) exhibit different language preferences than infants born to mothers speaking only one language.

Two groups of newborns were tested in these experiments: English monolinguals (whose mothers spoke only English during pregnancy) and Tagalog-English bilinguals (whose mothers spoke both Tagalog and English regularly during pregnancy).

Results showed that English monolingual infants were more interested in English than Tagalog. However, bilingual infants had an equal preference for both English and Tagalog. These results suggest that prenatal bilingual exposure may affect infants' language preferences, preparing bilingual infants to listen to and learn about both of their native languages.

Click here for more information on this research.

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