Bilingual Children May Perform Better at Recognizing Voices

Learning multiple languages is a good thing for your child. It can help them understand different cultures, make them more aware and confident, develop their communication skills and boost creativity. But did you also know that bilingual kids may be better at recognizing and processing different voices? According to a new study, published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, kids who speak several languages are more capable of recognizing voices than those who are monolingual.

According to researchers children who can speak and understand more than one language have better cognitive control and focus which makes them better at recognizing different voices. They have been exposed to listening to languages spoken with an accent and may have better social perception that helps them perceive voices more effectively. In simple terms, it may be easier for them to process information about who is talking.

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The study included a total of 41 children out of which 22 were monolingual English speaker and 19 were bilingual. They were divided into two age groups: nine years and younger, and 10 years and older. Researchers set out to analyse how children process information about who is talking and tried to understand if there were any differences between children speaking one language or multiple languages. Both groups were given a set of tasks to perform and it was seen that older children performed better than the younger ones which shows that their ability to process voices improves with age. This has also been confirmed by previous studies.

Further, it was also revealed that bilingual children performed better than monolingual children in recognizing and processing voices speaking in both English and German. When listening to both the languages, bilingual children were better at discriminating and identifying the voices. They were also faster at learning voices. Researchers believe that this study adds to the list of benefits of being bilingual and proves that it may actually be good for your child in not just one but several aspects.