18This summer a new study published Aug. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that bilingual infants as young as 20 months of age efficiently and accurately process 2 languages.
“By 20 months, bilingual babies already know something about the differences between words in their two languages,” said Casey Lew-Williams, assistant professor of psychology, co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab and co-author of the study.
“They do not think that ‘dog’ and ‘chien’ are just two versions of the same thing […] They implicitly know that these words belong to different languages.” Lew-Williams said.
More than just understand two languages children and adults who have a dual-language education have been observed to perform better in “tasks that require switching or the inhibiting of a previously learned response”, Lew-Williams said.
If you want to read more about this subject.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/07/bilingual-babies-listen-languages-and-dont-get-confused
Claudine
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