Loading...
Pediatricians recognize the myth that early exposure to two languages results in language confusion and delayed speech. Recently, pediatrician Perri Klass wrote in the New York Times about studies on early brain development in infants exposed to one or two languages in which early perception of sounds and words were measured by analyzing where babies turn their gaze and the duration of their attention in response to hearing sounds. Her observations include the following:
Electroencephalogram recordings in 6- to 12-month-old infants show that infants raised in a monolingual home are able to discriminate between different phonetic sounds when spoken in both the language they were exposed to or a different language; but, by 10 to 12 months, mon…