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I came across a fascinating TED Talk recently on how babies start to differentiate between different languages from a very early age.

The whole talk, by the University of Washington’s Patricia Kuhl, is worth checking out. It shows that, from a very young age, babies start to differentiate between the sounds that are part of their parents’ language, and sounds that are not.

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But the part I found most interesting was on how exposure to even small amounts of foreign languages at an early age can have a dramatic impact on children’s linguistic abilities.

Giving babies just 12 sessions in front of a Mandarin-speaking instructor dramatically increased their ability to differentiate Chinese sounds. This graphic below shows how, once exposed to those sessions, American infants could differentiate Chinese syllables almost as well as Taiwanese ones!

But what’s even more interesting is this effect does not work if the exposure to the language is by TV or radio, instead of a human being. The graphic above shows those exposed to hours of Mandarin-language TV shows were barely better at differentiating the sounds than those with no exposure at all. As Kuhl says: “It takes a human being.”

In other words, no matter how much you enjoy Ni Hao, Kai Lan or Dora the Explorer, you shouldn’t expect them to make your kids bilingual.

Though I am wondering if I should invite our friendly Chinese-speaking neighbours over someday to natter at the Younger Boy for a few hours.

You can watch the full TED Talk below. The section on TV vs. in-person Mandarin is at about the 5:30 mark:

[view:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XBIkHW954]