Bilingual Baby: Foreign Language Intervention in Madrid’s Infant Education Centers: Foreign Language Learning in Infancy

The first years of life represent a unique window of opportunity for foreign language learning. However, key questions are: How much and what kind of foreign language exposure is needed to ignite learning? We conducted a foreign language (English) intervention in four public Infant Education Centers in Madrid, Spain. Intervention children (N = 126, ages 7–33.5months) experienced 18 weeks of daily, hour-long, group English sessions with native-speaking tutors, using a brain-basedmethod of infant language development. Intervention infants were compared to a matched Current Practice Comparison (CPC) group of peers in the same schools. Intervention children outperformed the CPC group, showing rapid gains on measures of English word comprehension and English speech production. Schools’ neighborhoodwealth was not a significant factor in learning. Follow-up analyses show that the language gains were fully retained 18 weeks post-intervention. Children’s foreign language skills advance quickly in school using this research-to-practice curriculum. In today’s globalized world, knowing two languages presents important communicative, social, and economic advantages (Callahan & Gándara, 2014), in addition to the well-known cognitive benefits associated with bilingualism, such as advantages in executive functioning (Bialystok, 2011; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008), metalinguistic awareness (Barac & Bialystok, 2012), and more robust cognitive abilities with increased age (Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010). 1Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington Address correspondence to Naja Ferjan Ramirez, Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Box 357988, Seattle, WA 98195-7988, United States; [email protected] Studies show that the young brain is adept at acquiring two languages—brain responses at 11 months of age are equivalent for monolingual English-learning infants and Spanish-English bilingual infants in response to English syllables, whereas only Spanish-English bilinguals show strong brain responses to Spanish syllables (Ferjan Ramirez, Ramirez, Clarke, Taulu, & Kuhl, 2017). Infants are born with the ability to discriminate phonetic units across all languages (Kuhl et al., 2006; Werker & Tees, 1984), but perception narrows at about 12 months of age when first words appear, as infants begin to focus on the sounds contained in the language(s) they hear. Infants growing up in bilingual families achieve language milestones, such as babbling (“bababa” and “dadada”) and first words at the same age as their monolingual peers (Hoff et al., 2012; Petitto et al., 2001).