Whitney Weikum (pron. WHY-kum), a former Prince George resident andUNBC graduate, has discovered that babies as young as four months oldcan tell the difference between different languages just by watchingthe speaker’s mouth and facial expressions.

The research was recently published in Science, the world’s mostprestigious scientific research publication. The study involvedvideotaping people speaking English and French. The footage was thenplayed back to babies between the ages of four to eight months with thesound turned off. By analyzing how much attention the babies werepaying to the screen, the researchers were able to determine that thebabies could actually determine when the English stopped and the Frenchbegan, and vice versa.

“Other research has already determined that very young babies can hearthe differences between languages, but our study is the first to showthat young babies can tell languages apart by how they look, inaddition to how they sound,” says Whitney, who is currently finishingher PhD in Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. Theunique approach to the topic has attracted attention from the New YorkTimes, Time Magazine, CTV, CBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation,and other media outlets.

The research also discovered that older children growing up in amonolingual environment tended to lose the ability to visuallyrecognize language differences by the time they were eight months old.Children growing up in a multilingual household keep the ability tovisually discern between languages.

“This research is expanding our understanding of how children learnlanguage and the important role that visual cues may have,” saysWhitney.

Whitney graduated from Kelly Road Secondary in 1998 and completed aBachelor of Science Honours degree from UNBC in Psychology in 2002.

Contact:
Whitney Weikum, UNBC grad and UBC doctoral student – 604.822.7755
Rob van Adrichem, Director of Media and Public Relations, UNBC – 250.960.5622 

Media Download

Click on the thumbnail below to download a high-resolution photo of Whitney Weikum in her lab at UBC.