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Baby and mother

Bilingual babies practice lip-reading long before monolingual counterparts

Science

You’re in a crowded restaurant. You can’t make out what your companion is saying. So your eyes start to drift to your dining companions’ lips, to make out what they’re saying over the din. That’s because when speech is hard to hear, lip-reading provides extra clues for comprehension. It turns out we all learn this skill as infants. And bilingual infants do it the more than others.

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