A few months ago we posted an article about an amazing study which claimed that babies actually cry in their mother tongue. According to this study, babies actually reproduce the sounds they hear in the womb when they cry. Researchers from Würzburg University in Germany recorded 60 newborns (30 French and 30 German) crying just three to five days after their birth, and noted clear differences between the newborns based on their mother tongue.

This article generated a bit of discussion on our facebook and twitter pages as to what implications this phenomenon would have on bilingual children. Do bilingual babies cry in both languages? So when I read about a new study on infant bilingualism which was recently published in the scientific journal, Psychological Science, I just had to share. According to this study “infants born to bilingual mothers (who spoke both languages regularly during pregnancy) exhibit different language preferences than infants born to mothers speaking only one language.”

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in France charted the sucking reflexes (apparently this reflex in newborns indicates the baby’s interest in a stimulus) of two groups of monolingual and bilingual infants when exposed to ten minutes of alternating speech between two languages. The monolingual infants only showed sucking preference when they heard their mother tongue, but the bilingual infants showed equal preference for both their mother tongues.

To me one of the most fascinating parts of this study is the fact that babies were not just responding positively to a bunch of familiar sounds they heard in the womb. From the time they were born, on some primitive level, these babies were able to distinguish between the two languages as two separate stimuli. According to the article, “infants listened to sentences being spoken in one of the languages until they lost interest. Then, they either heard sentences in the other language or heard sentences in the same language, but spoken by a different person. Infants exhibited increased sucking when they heard the other language being spoken. Their sucking did not increase if they heard additional sentences in the same language.” This evidence suggests that infants are actually born with the capacity to simultaneously learn two or more languages without confusing them. Once again, I’m blown away by these tiny language learning machines!