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Want your child to be clever? Teach them two languages: Study finds bilingual babies often show signs of having a higher IQ

Published: 02:43 EST, 5 September 2014 | Updated: 06:34 EST, 5 September 2014

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Bilingual babies benefit from multiple advantages when it comes to cognitive development.

It seems the little ones of parents who speak two languages in front of them from day one get bored of familiar images quicker and tend to prefer observing the novelty.

This is a known predictor of better pre-school development, such as high IQ test scores, according to experts.

Six-month old bilingual babies recognised familiar images faster than those from monolingual homes

The benefits for babies exposed to two languages were discovered in a Singaporean birth cohort study.

A team of investigators and clinician scientists found a cognitive advantage emerges early in bilingual babies - and is not specific to a particular language.

Findings came from a long term cohort study (one involving subjects who share an event together over a stretch of time).

Singaporean mothers and their infants took part, and results showed that six-month old bilingual babies recognised familiar images faster than those brought up in monolingual homes.

They also paid more attention to novel images compared to toddlers who were exposed to just one language.

In Singapore, it's more common for babies to be brought up in bilingual homes

For example, all babies were shown a coloured image of either a bear or a wolf.

For half the group, the bear was made to become the familiar image (one they were shown multiple times) while the wolf was the novel one, and vice versa.

The study showed that bilingual babies got bored of familiar images faster than monolingual babies.

The findings were published online in the latest issue of scientific journal Child Development, according to Science Daily.

Past studies show that the rate at which an infant becomes bored of a familiar image and develops a preference for novelty is a common predictor of better pre-school developmental outcomes.

'A six-month old in a bilingual home is not just learning another language; it is learning two languages while learning to discern between the two languages it is hearing'

These include advanced performance in concept formation, non-verbal cognition, expressive and receptive language, and IQ tests.

Babies who looked at the image and then rapidly got bored, demonstrated higher performance in various domains of cognition and language later on as children.

Bilingual babies also stared for longer periods of time at the novel image than their monolingual counterparts, demonstrating a preference for novelty.

Other studies show this is linked with improved performance in later IQ and vocabulary tests around the 4+ age mark.

A bilingual baby encounters more novel (i.e. new, unknown) linguistic information than its monolingual peers.

A six-month old in a bilingual home is not just learning another language; it is learning two languages while learning to discern between the two languages it is hearing.

'Babies are uniquely well positioned to take on the challenges of bilingual acquisition,' says Professor

It is possible that since learning two languages at once requires more information-processing efficiency, the infants have a chance to rise to this challenge by developing skills to cope with it.

Associate Professor Leher Singh is from the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

As lead author of this study, he commented: 'One of the biggest challenges of infant research is data collection.

'Visual habituation works wonderfully because it only takes a few minutes and capitalises on what babies do so naturally, which is to rapidly become interested in something new and then rapidly move on to something else.

'Even though it is quite a simple task, visual habituation is one of the few tasks in infancy that has been shown to predict later cognitive development.'

Associate Professor Leher Singh said: 'As adults, learning a second language can be painstaking and laborious. We sometimes project that difficulty onto our young babies, imagining a state of enormous confusion as two languages jostle for space in their little heads.

However, a large number of studies have shown us that babies are uniquely well positioned to take on the challenges of bilingual acquisition and in fact, may benefit from this journey.'