HUANGCHUAN VILLAGE, CHINA – Every day after lunch, Qu Yexiu used to potter around her house in northwest China doing housework and looking after her 2-year-old grandson. Now, every day after lunch, Qu and her grandson visit the newly opened early-childhood development center in their village of Huangchuan in the mountains of Shaanxi province, where he can play with other toddlers. "Things are better now that we have this village center," said Qu, 56. She looks after her two grandchildren while their parents work and live in nearby Anhui province. The other grandchild attends a preschool.

A recent study published in the Royal Society Open Science shows that babies can retain languages spoken to them in the first few months of life even if they move elsewhere and "forget" the language. Babies will always have some sort of familiarity with the language as long as that language was heard in its early life, researchers concluded. Dr. Jiyoun Choi and colleagues at Hanyang University in Seoul conducted the research by testing Dutch-speaking adults, who were adopted from South Korea. The point of the study was to show the adopted children were at an automatic advantage since the Korean language was spoken to them in their early life, even if they thought they had forgotten it. ''This finding indicates that useful language knowledge is laid down in [the] very early months of life, which can be retained without further input of the language and revealed via re-learning,'' Choi told BBC News.

Babies are remarkable at taking in knowledge about the language they hear. Even in the first few months of their lives, children begin to learn about how to pronounce words – and it seems this is a skill they never forget. A new study has shown even if a baby moves country at a young age and never learns its birth language; it will always retain some hidden knowledge of the words it heard in its early life. Babies are remarkable at taking in knowledge about the language they hear. Dr Jiyoun Choi and colleauges at Hanyang University in Seoul tested Dutch-speaking adults adopted from South Korea.

Babies build knowledge about the language they hear even in the first few months of life, research shows. If you move countries and forget your birth language, you retain this hidden ability, according to a study. Dutch-speaking adults adopted from South Korea exceeded expectations at Korean pronunciation when retrained after losing their birth language. Scientists say parents should talk to babies as much as possible in early life. Dr Jiyoun Choi of Hanyang University in Seoul led the research.