Even with the sound turned off, babies can tell whether a person speaking on video has switched between English and French, a new study suggests. The findings are the latest contribution to a growing body of research on the remarkable ability of very young infants to process languages. The paper also shows that babies growing up in bilingual households are better able to retain that ability to visually perceive a switch to another language, whereas such a skill declines among those raised in unilingual settings. Conducted at the University of British Columbia, the appears today in the journal Science. It comes as other scientists have documented the great abilities of babies to distinguish vowels, consonants, rhythmic patterns and tonal inflections in languages the infants don’t yet speak, even in languages that are not native to them. Seven-month-old Quinn watches a silent video clip of a bilingual speaker at the University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre. Lyle Stafford for The Globe and Mail Babies from English-speaking families are, for example, able to distinguish between similar Hindi-language sounds that adult English speakers would struggle to tell apart. But unless they remain exposed to other languages the […]