Babies can spot languages on facial clues alone

Young babies can discriminate between different languages just by looking at an adult's face, even if they do not hear a single spoken word. And babies who grow up bilingual can do this for longer than monolingual infants. The work suggests that visual information helps to tell languages apart.

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This supports the idea that infants come prepared to learn multiple languages and to discriminate them both auditorily and visually," says Whitney Weikum from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who discovered babies' keen eye for speech. "Looking at a face may help identify speakers of your native language."

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A good eye for different languages appears to be especially important if you need to tell them apart regularly.

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At eight months old, bilingual babies could still see the switch happen, but their monolingual peers stopped noticing it after the age of six months

clipped from: www.newscientist.com