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Originally Posted by alanX
This research is new. Have you read the article? Please read the article before saying things like "this is old." etc. Thanks.
KyleGoatz, yes. The first is pretty much common sense, but this new thing about computer programs is definitely new to me. I've never heard of such a program. I actually watched a documentary on these "make your baby smarter" programs on the Discovery Channel a few days ago.
Something I might take a shot at with my child, as I want him/her to be bilingual.
And these experiments done with Japanese babies and Western babies is quite interesting, as well.
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You don't need the program with your kid. Babies are born with a blank slate and can hear every difference just fine. Provided you start them hearing both languages when they're infants, you're golden without needing any extra stuff to preserve their ability to discern sounds.
For example, there are two different "p" sounds in English, the "p" in "happen" (non-aspirated) and the "p" in "pen" (aspirated). An English speaker would hear and treat them the same, but a Hindi speaker would hear them as different sounds because in Hindi, the two sounds are separate phonemes, but in English they are the same phoneme. This means that the sounds don't change meaning of words in English, but they do in Hindi.
Thus, native speakers of English treat the sounds as the same and as they age they lose the ability to hear the difference. Hindi speakers remain attuned to the sonic difference and thus never lose the ability.
This exact same phenomenon is why English speakers retain the ability to hear the difference between "l" and "r" while Japanese people lose the ability.
tl;dr The program is absolutely unnecessary if you raise your kid from birth bilingually (or multilingually). E.g., my girlfriend's sister is raising her kid trilingually (grandparents = Mandarin, mother = Spanish, father and home country surroundings = English). My girlfriend was likewise raised quasi-trilingually (parents = Mandarin and Taiwanese, home country surroundings = Spanish). Just becaues her parents swapped Mandarin and Taiwanese without any set rules, my girlfriend's grasp of the distinction between the two is a bit tenuous.
When raising your kid bilingually, set some type of separation between the languages. You can have the parents exclusively use a different language when one-on-one with the kid. There was a famous Indian mathematician whose family in India had a three story house, and so had a rule: English on floor one, Hindi on floor two, French on floor three. The family's children were fluent in all three.