Would it not be great if any child could grow up bilingual? Because of the many benefits of bilingualism, a start-up company developed a program called TuMi Mundo that attempts to make it possible...Show moreWould it not be great if any child could grow up bilingual? Because of the many benefits of bilingualism, a start-up company developed a program called TuMi Mundo that attempts to make it possible for infants to acquire a second language via non-live exposure only. This study reflects on the first experiment to test if this is indeed possible. A Head Turn Preference Procedure was conducted to test the language preference of the infants after two months of near-daily exposure. Previous studies showed that monolinguals prefer their native language and bilinguals prefer both languages equally. We compared the babies exposed to the app with a monolingual control group and found that the exposed infants indeed showed no preference, but the monolinguals did neither. This lack of expected preference in the monolinguals makes the bilingual-like behavior of the exposed infants uninterpretable. The results of this study are therefore not enough to answer the question whether non-live exposure is enough to make an infant perceive the language as native.Show less
