Face Talk: Babies see their way to language insights
By Bruce Bower
To a 4-to-6-month-old baby, a talking face that can be seen but not heard still speaks volumes. Infants in that age range can distinguish between two languages solely by looking at a speaker’s face, without hearing a sound, a new study suggests.
This ability declines between 6 months and 8 months of age, at least for infants exposed to only one language at home, reports a team led by psychologist Whitney M. Weikum of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Previous studies had found that performance drops on similar perceptual tasks toward the end of a baby’s first year. Infants around that age, for example, lose the ability to match monkeys’ facial movements to the corresponding sounds (SN: 4/22/06, p. 246).