Being Human | Núria Sebastián Gallés
Channel: World Economic Forum
Date: 21/10/2015

Bilingual babies can discriminate between two different languages just by watching people speak, says experimental psychologist Núria Sabastián Gallés in this video for the World Economic Forum. Galles - who is Vice-President of the  Scientific Committee, European Research Council, Spain - shows how humans are born able to do complex computations. She also explores the different ways bilingual and monolingual babies use visual clues to differentiate between languages, and how this impacts on social decision making. 

Click on the link to watch the interactive presentation, or read some quotes below. 

On our early ability to discriminate 
“There is a group of people talking in a park, probably having a good time. In principle there is nothing surprising about the image. Let's hear about what they might be saying. Some of you may be surprised that we made some expectations about the language that they would be speaking, or at least the group of languages that they might be speaking - Chinese not being one of them. And then, what we heard was people at the bar speaking in Chinese.” 

“To be able to do this, we have had to perform a number of very complicated computations. On the one hand we have had to analyze the visual image to recognize that there are human beings, and that these human beings are of a caucasian origin. On the other hand we have had to perform another set of very complicated computations too, this time over the language of the speech stream; to recognize that there was a particular language or at least a language that didn't sound familiar to some, and to the others it did sound familiar, namely Chinese.”
 
On telling the difference between tongues
“Speech is not only something that comes through our ear, we also see speech. When we are in a very noisy environment, we tend not to look at the eyes of the person, but if we are having difficulties in understanding what is being said, we will look at the mouth. The mouth also conveys important information about what's being said.”

“If you cannot notice the articulation of two different languages from a visual point of view, then the problem is that you are too old. If you were four or six months of age, it would be a piece of cake. At four and six months of age, babies had no difficulties noticing that the speaker is speaking two different languages. However eight months is already too old, and the infants no longer show the capacity to differentiate between different languages.  This is if the babies are monolingual. If the babies are bilingual - namely they are learning French and English - then at eight month they can still tell the difference.” 

On why babies care 
“We presented babies with a video of an actor introducing herself in a particular language, the language could be the language of the babies, namely Spanish, or it could be a different language that they don’t know - in our case it was German. Then they saw a series of videos where they repeatedly saw things like this: an actor observing a ball going into a box, and when the ball was inside the actor would pick up the ball. When the ball got out of the box, the actor would do nothing.” 

“Finally they saw a video where a curtain comes down, and the ball goes inside the box and then it goes out. Just at the moment when the curtain goes up, we measured the brain activity of the babies. If the babies were mind reading the actor, then they would think that she would go and pick up the ball, because she didn't see that the ball went out of the box. This is the mind reading capacity of humans: we know that humans behave because of the things that they have in their heads, not what the reality is. If the babies think that whenever the ball is not in the box, you shouldn't bother looking for the ball because it is no longer there, then what happens is that the baby should not care.”