Babies raised bilingual may be brighter, study conducted in Singapore finds

SINGAPORE: Babies exposed to two languages display better learning and memory skills than those who are exposed to one language, a new study here has found.

The study of 114 six-month old infants found bilingual babies recognised familiar images faster and paid more attention to novel images than those brought up in monolingual homes. The findings are not specific to a particular language.

The study, released on Tuesday (Sep 2), is part of a long-term birth cohort study of Singaporean mothers and their offspring, known as Growing Up in Singapore Towards Healthy Outcomes (Gusto). It was jointly undertaken by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's Singapore Institute for Clinical Studies (SICS), KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) and the National University Hospital (NUH).

Infants were shown a coloured image of either a bear or a wolf. For half the group, the bear was made to become the 'familiar' image while the wolf was the 'novel' one, and vice versa for the rest of the group. The study showed that bilingual babies got bored of familiar images faster than monolingual babies, and stared for longer periods of time at the novel image.

Past studies have shown that babies who rapidly get bored with a familiar image demonstrated higher cognition and language ability later on as children, according to a joint media release issued by SICS, KKH, NUH, the National University Health System and the National University of Singapore (NUS). A preference for novelty is also linked with higher IQs and better scores in vocabulary tests during pre-school and school-going years.

A bilingual infant encounters more novel linguistic information than its monolingual peers. A six-month old infant in a bilingual home is not just learning another language; it is learning two languages while learning to discern between the two languages it is hearing. It is possible that since learning two languages at once requires more information-processing efficiency, the infants have a chance to rise to this challenge by developing skills to cope with it, the release said.

NUS Associate Professor Leher Singh, the lead author of the study, said: 'As adults, learning a second language can be painstaking and laborious. We sometimes project that difficulty onto our young babies, imagining a state of enormous confusion as two languages jostle for space in their little heads. However, a large number of studies have shown us that babies are uniquely well positioned to take on the challenges of bilingual acquisition and in fact, may benefit from this journey.'

(Photo: A child going through the visual habituation test in the Gusto study) (Photo: Facial imitation test on the day of birth, recorded on video for neurocognitive analysis)

(Photo: A 6-month old baby fitted with EEG net cap for tests in the SICS Neurodevelopment Research Centre.)