Learning new languages easiest for the very, very young

Article from TheRecord.com by Luisa D'Amato:

Long before they say their first word, babies are wired to learn many languages.

A growing body of research shows that infants only a few months old have the capacity to be multilingual.

They can identify sounds from foreign languages much better than their parents can. They can recognize accent patterns of different languages. And they can even distinguish between different facial expressions produced by speaking English one minute, French the next.

These abilities start to disappear after about eight months of age, unless the child is already exposed to different languages in his or her daily life.

Researchers think this is because, by eight months of age, the child's brain is focusing only on the sounds of the language spoken daily.

Still, there's excitement in the growing awareness that babies seem to know so much more than we thought.

"The mind is prepared to be multilingual," said Athena Vouloumanos, a psychology professor at McGill University in Montreal who has researched babies' responses to silent videotapes of people speaking French and English.

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