Bilingual Babies

Another example comes from the other end of life and has to do with what's called wonder babies. This was a study which was done a few years ago in Trieste which is basically at the border on Slovenia and Italy. So there are a lot of Italians and there are a lot of Slovenians and there are of course a lot of mixed marriages. What they did was they took three groups of babies, all babies were seven months old so there were a bunch of Italian speaking babies, bunch of Slovenian speaking babies and a bunch of Italian-Slovenian babies from mixed families. They showed those babies various puppets and then they switched the situation. Typically, when the seven-month-old baby is used to particular setting and the situation switches it takes them a little while to regroup. So turned out that seven-month-old Italian and seven-month-old Slovenian babies would get used to the puppet appearing on the right, and then when the puppet would appear on the left they would continue looking to the right as if nothing had changed. Whereas the bilingual babies very quickly would turn their head and notice that the puppet has changed its position.