Bilingual babies prefer baby talk - in any language

Babies prefer baby talk in any language, but particularly when it's in a language they're hearing at home, according to a new study including close to 700 babies on four continents. The research, which was published today in the journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science and included researchers from McGill University, showed that all babies respond more to infant-directed speech - baby talk -than they do to adult-directed speech. It also revealed that babies as young as six months can pick up on differences in language around them. "We were able to compare babies from bilingual backgrounds to babies from monolingual backgrounds, and what seemed to matter the most was the match between the language they heard in their everyday environment and the language we were playing them in the study," says primary investigator Krista Byers-Heinlein , an associate professor of psychology in Concordia University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who directs the Concordia Infant Research Lab. "It is natural for Canada to lead research into bilingualism and language learning," said Linda Polka from McGill's School of Communication Disorders. Her research group, the McGill Infant Speech Perception Lab - helped build this rich data set by testing babies from bilingual (mostly French/English) families and also babies from monolingual French families. "Roughly a third of the contributing labs in this project - and more than any other country - are in Canada and Canadian scientists also played a prominent role in the leadership team." Babies from around the globe.