Do Babies Understand Their Native Language? New Study Shows Babies Will Remember Birth Language Even If They 'Forget' As Adults

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.