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

The research was recently published in Science, the world’s most prestigious scientific research publication. The study involved videotaping people speaking English and French. The footage was then played back to babies between the ages of four to eight months with the sound turned off. By analyzing how much attention the babies were paying to the screen, the researchers were able to determine that the babies could actually determine when the English stopped and the French began, and vice versa.

“Other research has already determined that very young babies can hear the differences between languages, but our study is the first to show that young babies can tell languages apart by how they look, in addition to how they sound,” says Whitney, who is currently finishing her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. The unique approach to the topic has attracted attention from the New York Times, Time Magazine, CTV, CBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and other media outlets.

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

“This research is expanding our understanding of how children learn language and the important role that visual cues may have,” says Whitney.

Whitney graduated from Kelly Road Secondary in 1998 and completed a Bachelor 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 

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