What I learned from working at Oxford Babylab

For my first job after my psychology undergraduate, I worked as a research assistant at a Babylab in Oxford. One of the big questions that were being asked in that lab concerned the topic of language acquisition: How do babies learn language and why does it seem so quick and effortless?

It might seem unfair that adults have such a hard time learning new words and grammar in a foreign language, while infants seem to put no effort into learning their mother tongue.

Many of us dream of being fluent in several other languages. Wouldn't it be great to go to France and order a baguette in perfect French, then travel to Italy and purchase a gondola ticket in Venice in a brilliant Venetian dialect, then fly to Russia and listen to some Bolshoi Ballerinas talk about their hectic life? Especially here in Europe, we are surrounded by so many other countries, most of which have their own language(s). Unfortunately, most of us still only speak one or two languages and the older we get, the more we tend to struggle with language learning. Babies on the contrary, seem to be masters at it.

Infants start to learn words through listening to the people around them. From very early on, even before being born, they hear people talking. However, the words they hear can sound different each time. Lots of factors can determine how speech sounds, for example the emotional state, sex, age, and speaking style of the speaker, dialects, accents, a sore throat, or levels of noisiness in the environment. In addition, adults often use a sort of baby-talk when speaking to young children. We call this infant-directed speech. While it might sound silly and you may think it's unnecessary, it does serve a great purpose: Infant-directed speech is slower and more high-pitched than normal speech. That makes is a lot easier for babies to identify the beginning and the end of single words in a stream of speech.

As you can see, there are quite a few reasons that could make it hard for infants to learn new words. They might be confronted with not just different dialects, which is a particular form of the same language (e.g. the Venetian Italian dialect mentioned above), but also with different accents (the way speakers sound when they pronounce words in a non-native language). One and the same word could therefore potentially sound very different each time they hear it, depending on how many speakers they are in contact with.

The phenomenon described here is called phonological constancy, the ability to understand that a word and its meaning remain the same despite phonetic variations. This is an important principle required for language acquisition. For example, when we watch TV and listen to an Australian Show where an American actor is being interviewed, we understand naturally that the Australian pronunciation of the word 'nice' [nɑes] will be different to the American one [naIs], but in the end the two people mean the exact same thing. Of course, this understanding comes naturally to us, if we're fluent in English. However, people who only just started learning English might have a hard time with this show and may revert to subtitles if they are unfamiliar with the Australian and/or American accent.

What do you think would make it easier to tune into TV shows like the one described above? Do you think a person who has been exposed to many different accents and dialects might find it easier to adjust to new sounds? Well, that's exactly what some researchers think as well.

And who are these people? It could just be people who watch a lot of international television. But there are also others, who got used to listening to more than one language right from the start of their lives: The bilinguals, trilinguals and multilinguals among us.

So what's different about a child that grows up bilingually in comparison to their monolingual peers? Let's think about it. There are many different reasons and scenarios in which more than one language could come into play in somebody's upbringing. The child might live in an area that has more than one national language, like Quebec. Their parents might have different mother tongues. Their parents might have the same mother tongue but moved to a different country or area where another language is spoken. Many more contexts are conceivable.

Bilingual children often don't just encounter more than one language in their environment. They frequently handle non-native accents as well. See scenario two, where the parents have different mother tongues. Let's say the dad is Italian and the mum is Romanian. They might speak Romanian to each other, but while the father will sound like a native, the mother will most likely have a bit of an accent. The child therefore learns from a young age to tolerate slight deviations from 'how words are supposed to be pronounced'. Ergo, they might develop a lot of acceptance towards accents, errors, or mispronunciations.

Accent perception can be observed quite early in life. For example, we know that 6-month-old Australian infants listen longer to Australian English than to South-African English. We therefore conclude that they can probably distinguish between the two.

The Oxford Brookes Babylab is currently investigating the concept of phonological constancy in mono- and bilingual infants. Since bilingual toddlers have the benefit of a natural and long-term exposure to two languages, they might display phonological constancy in accent perception earlier than monolingual toddlers.

If you're based in Oxford, are interested to find out more, or if you are a parent of an infant/toddler, you might want to check out their website and register your child. The lab is always looking for new participants. If you liked this article, you can also find more facts, myths, tips and questions on bilingualism on their website. The study team will share their results from current studies once they have been published.

Natascha Niekamp is a Graduate Member of the BPS and a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, working in the TOPIC research group.

TOPIC is the Oxford Psychological Interventions for Children and Adolescent Research Group.

One of their projects is the MY-CATS study, a research project which aims to minimise young children's anxiety through schools.