Is Dutch native English? Linguistic analysis by 2-month-olds

A variant of the non-nutritive habituation/dishabituation sucking method was used to test 2-month-old English infants’ perception of languages. This method tests for the spontaneous interest of the baby to a change in the stimulus. English and Japanese were clearly discriminated. The difference between French and Japanese was equally clearly not of interest to babies using this procedure, the babies behaving as though both languages were classified simply as ‘foreign’. In order to further specify babies’ representation of native and foreign language, we used Dutch, which shares a number of suprasegmental features with English. The results from our last 2 experiments indicate that a portion of our 6 – 12 weekold babies consider Dutch as native, suggesting that we tapped in a transition period where the babies are still refining the suprasegmental specification of their native language. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Developmental Science 1:2 pp 215–219 Send correspondence to: Anne Christophe LSCP, CNRS-EHESS, 54, Bd Raspail, 75006 Paris, France.