Bilingual Babies Differentiate between Grammatical Structures by 7 Months

Children who grow up in a bilingual environment acquire the basics of both languages at an early age, and can differentiate between grammatical structures of the two languages by seven months, a new study says.

The findings come as a relief to parents and contradict the previous belief that bilingualism can have a negative impact on children.

The study, published in the Journal Nature Communications, found that infants who grow up with bilingual parents use pitch and duration cues to successfully differentiate two totally different languages with opposite word orders, like English and Japanese.

"By as early as seven months, babies are sensitive to these differences and use these as cues to tell the languages apart," University British Columbia psychologist Janet Werker, co-author of the study, said in a news release.

Findings of the current study support a study conducted by the same researchers earlier. They found babies normally learning the significance of a word through the number of times it has been used in a sentence.

"For example, in English the words 'the' and 'with' come up a lot more frequently than other words - they're essentially learning by counting," Judit Gervain said. "But babies growing up bilingual need more than that, so they develop new strategies that monolingual babies don't necessarily need to use."

Encouraged by the findings, researchers urged parents to avoid unnecessary worries of exposing their little ones to two languages at home.

"If you speak two languages at home, don't be afraid, it's not a zero-sum game," Werker said. "Your baby is very equipped to keep these languages separate and they do so in remarkable ways."

Similar to the current study, previous studies have shown the benefits of knowing two languages in childhood. A study published in International Journal of Bilingualism in August 2012 found bilingual children excelling in problem-solving skills and creative thinking compared to their monolingual peers.