Tiny Infants Can Distinguish English, French, Study Finds

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"One of the remarkable things about these findings is that very young infants come to world prepared to discriminate between different kinds of languages based only on visual information," says Athena Vouloumanos, an assistant professor in McGill's Department of Psychology who codesigned and helped conduct the study.

"We always think about babies being born as fairly helpless," she said from Vancouver. "But what this shows is... that babies have quite a sophisticated set of sensibilities at birth."

"One possibility is the rhythms of the language," Vouloumanos said. "English and French are actually in different rhythmical classes -- English is a stress-based language, while French is syllable-based."

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Tiny Infants Can Distinguish English, French, Study Finds

By Jonathan Montpetit

MONTREAL -- They may not understand what you're saying, but a new study suggests that babies as young as four ...

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