ÜDS-Sosyal 2012-2 Soru=53

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Recent research suggests that not only can children
differentiate between two languages at an early age, but
also show cognitive benefits from being exposed to a
second language starting as early as infancy. In a study
in 2009 of ‘crib bilinguals’, cognitive psychologists
Agnes Kovács and Jacques Mehler used a visual test to
measure cognitive flexibility in preverbal
seven-month-olds. Kovács and Mehler wanted to see
how quickly the infants could adapt to changing rules.
They taught the infants a pattern consisting of
speech-like sounds. At the end of the sequence, a
visual reward in the form of a puppet would appear in
one part of a computer screen. The infants were
expected to learn that a given sound pattern predicated
the appearance of the puppet in that location. Both
bilingual and monolingual infants showed that they
associated the sound sequence with the puppet’s
location equally well by looking in the right place for the
puppet to appear. But when Kovács and Mehler
modified the sequence – and moved the puppet – the
bilingual infants adjusted, switching their anticipatory
gaze to the new location. The monolingual infants,
however, continued to look for the puppet in the original
location.