Looking for milestones together linguistics
Research in Beijing and Utrecht could help identify speech or psychiatric disorders in children at a much earlier stage than currently possible. When does a Dutch baby stop hearing the difference between the Chinese words for horse and mother? Both are spelled “ma”, but pronounced differently. Meanwhile, how do Chinese babies learn to discriminate between these tones? These are the questions at the heart of research being carried out jointly by René Kager, Professor of Linguistics at Utrecht University, and Li Aijun, Professor and Director of the phonetics laboratory at the Institute of Linguistics, part of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Their joint project is funded by the China Exchange Programme. “Up to six months old, infants are able to hear the difference between both native and non-native sounds, but as they grow older, their listening ability is tuned by the native language,” says Professor Li in her laboratory in the heart of the Chinese capital. “The Chinese tones are extremely difficult for adult foreigners to learn. We are trying to find out at what age the Dutch babies lose their ability to hear Chinese tones.” Experiment Chinese and Dutch infants aged six, nine, eleven, and fourteen months are participating in the experiment. Professor Li shows the room where the Chinese part of the research is carried out. A red sofa is situated in front of a flat-screen TV. She explains:
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