Polyglot babies 'more tolerant' (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Polyglot babies 'more tolerant'

Leigh Dayton, Science writer | July 18, 2007
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22093479-30417,00.html

A STUDY of newborn babies and preschoolers has revealed that language may be
the root of prejudice - and the way to avoid it.

US and French researchers have found that the language babies hear spoken in
their first six months of life leads to a preference for speakers of that
language.

The preference is so entrenched that by age five youngsters prefer playmates
who not only speak the same language but do so with the same accent.

A key implication of the findings - reported in the US publication
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science - is that children exposed
to different languages grow into more tolerant adults than their
monolingual mates.

Linguist Stephen Crain of Sydney's Macquarie University  tended to agree:
"I've always thought it would be beneficial to expose our children to more
than one language," he said. "If they no longer have a prejudice against
people who don't sound the same as they, they may be more accepting of
people from different backgrounds who don't sound the same," Professor
Crain said.

Cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, conducted a series of experiments with Harvard doctoral
student Katherine Kinzler and Emmanuel Dupoux of the National Centre for
Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

They judged the preferences of three groups of children. Five-to
six-month-old infants looked at native speakers longer than non-native
speakers.

Ten-month-olds selected toys most often from native speakers, and most
five-year-olds chose native speaking playmates over children with an
accent.

According to Professor Spelke, the most surprising result came from the
group's experiment with five-year-olds. "The findings suggest that (the
preference) has nothing to do with information, the semantics of language,
but rather with group identity," she said.

If so, Professor Crain said that may answer the mystery about human
languages: why do they diverge yet retain common structural properties?
"One obvious answer is the differences are the means by which people
segregate themselves by speaking a language which can't be understood by
people from the next community," he said.