Northeastern.edu – Greg St. Martin
“New research from Northeastern developmental psychologist David J. Lewkowicz shows that infants learning more than one language do more lip-reading than infants learning a single language…“These results provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of people’s ability to acquire more than one language at the same time early in life,” said Lewkowicz, a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences…The findings, he said, could also play a role in treating and diagnosing children with communicative and learning disorders like autism…Lewkowicz noted that his team’s research offers insight into what kinds of information to expose children to in order to help them acquire two languages more effectively. Babies, he explained, go through an intense period of learning in the first year and during this time they acquire expertise in their native language. Paradoxically, while native-language expertise emerges, babies’ ability to perceive other languages declines—a process known as perceptual narrowing…The flip side of this is that exposure to multiple languages in infancy prevents narrowing…”(more)