Medical X-Press – Staff Writer
“Bilingual children are better than their monolingual peers at perceiving information about who is talking, including recognizing voices, according to a study by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The findings, published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, suggest yet another advantage of speaking multiple languages beyond the well-known cognitive benefits. “Bilingual children have a perceptual advantage when processing information about a talker’s voice. This advantage exists in the social aspect of speech perception, where the focus is not on processing the linguistic information, but instead on processing information about who is talking. Speech simultaneously carries information about what is being said and who is saying it,” said Susannah Levi, assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders at NYU Steinhardt and the study’s author.”(more)