Posted on Yahoo News
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
Tue Jul 21, 3:08 am ET
WASHINGTON – The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?
New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.
"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.
Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday. Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English — "rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.
Time out — how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.
Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit. "You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains — or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two
languages. It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months. Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
For kids, two languages can be as easy as one
Posted on Babycenter.com
Thu, Jul 9, 2009 (HealthDay News) -- European researchers are contesting the assumption that bilingual toddlers have more trouble learning language skills than children who know just one language. "While the remarkable performance of children acquiring one language is impressive, many children acquire more than one language simultaneously," said study author Agnes Melinda Kovacs, a research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy. "As bilingual children presumably have to learn roughly twice as much as their
monolingual peers [because they learn two languages instead of one], one would expect their language acquisition to be somewhat delayed. However, bilinguals pass the language development milestones at the same ages as their monolingual peers."
The finding, which appears online July 9 in Science, came from a test of the responses to verbal and visual cues from 64 babies who were 12 months old. They came from monolingual and bilingual families, although the study did not specify which languages the families spoke.
The toddlers were exposed to two sets of words that had different structural characteristics. After each word, the children viewed a special toy on either the left or right side of a screen, depending on the word's structure. They then were presented with words they had never heard before but that conformed to one of the two verbal structures. No toy followed.
Researchers determined whether the infants had learned the word structures by measuring the direction of their gaze after hearing each new word. Judging by their eye movements, the bilingual kids did better in recognizing words than their monolingual peers. "We showed that pre-verbal, 12-month-old, bilingual infants have become more flexible at learning speech structures than monolinguals," Kovacs said. "When given the opportunity to simultaneously learn two different regularities, bilingual infants learned both, while monolinguals learned only one of them." This means, she said, that "bilinguals may acquire two languages in the time in which monolinguals acquire one because they quickly become more flexible learners."
According to the study, the cognitive pathways developed during the learning of two languages might make bilingual children more efficient in acquiring new information. Earlier research has often confirmed the benefits of learning more than one language. In a 2004 Canadian study, for
example, researchers found that bilingual speakers were more proficient at dealing with distractions than those who spoke only a single language. That ability was even more pronounced for older people, suggesting that multilingualism might help elderly speakers avoid age-related cognitive problems.
A significant percentage of humanity speaks more than one language. In the United States, more than 18 percent of the population aged 5 and older speaks a language other than English at home, according to the 2000 U.S. census.
One child psychologist who read the Italian study found the results intriguing and said she would like to see further research on how children learn different languages, especially ones with different tonal structures, such as Chinese and English. "We now know, thanks to [functional MRI] studies that allow us to observe the working brain, that learning does result in discrete changes in 'wiring,'" said Marta Flaum, whose practice in Chappaqua, N.Y. specializes in diagnosing and helping children with dyslexia and other language handicaps. "It would make sense that learning a second language affects brain changes as well." However, Flaum said, "we know that the young brain is more plastic than the older brain, making it easier to learn at an earlier age."
Thu, Jul 9, 2009 (HealthDay News) -- European researchers are contesting the assumption that bilingual toddlers have more trouble learning language skills than children who know just one language. "While the remarkable performance of children acquiring one language is impressive, many children acquire more than one language simultaneously," said study author Agnes Melinda Kovacs, a research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy. "As bilingual children presumably have to learn roughly twice as much as their
monolingual peers [because they learn two languages instead of one], one would expect their language acquisition to be somewhat delayed. However, bilinguals pass the language development milestones at the same ages as their monolingual peers."
The finding, which appears online July 9 in Science, came from a test of the responses to verbal and visual cues from 64 babies who were 12 months old. They came from monolingual and bilingual families, although the study did not specify which languages the families spoke.
The toddlers were exposed to two sets of words that had different structural characteristics. After each word, the children viewed a special toy on either the left or right side of a screen, depending on the word's structure. They then were presented with words they had never heard before but that conformed to one of the two verbal structures. No toy followed.
Researchers determined whether the infants had learned the word structures by measuring the direction of their gaze after hearing each new word. Judging by their eye movements, the bilingual kids did better in recognizing words than their monolingual peers. "We showed that pre-verbal, 12-month-old, bilingual infants have become more flexible at learning speech structures than monolinguals," Kovacs said. "When given the opportunity to simultaneously learn two different regularities, bilingual infants learned both, while monolinguals learned only one of them." This means, she said, that "bilinguals may acquire two languages in the time in which monolinguals acquire one because they quickly become more flexible learners."
According to the study, the cognitive pathways developed during the learning of two languages might make bilingual children more efficient in acquiring new information. Earlier research has often confirmed the benefits of learning more than one language. In a 2004 Canadian study, for
example, researchers found that bilingual speakers were more proficient at dealing with distractions than those who spoke only a single language. That ability was even more pronounced for older people, suggesting that multilingualism might help elderly speakers avoid age-related cognitive problems.
A significant percentage of humanity speaks more than one language. In the United States, more than 18 percent of the population aged 5 and older speaks a language other than English at home, according to the 2000 U.S. census.
One child psychologist who read the Italian study found the results intriguing and said she would like to see further research on how children learn different languages, especially ones with different tonal structures, such as Chinese and English. "We now know, thanks to [functional MRI] studies that allow us to observe the working brain, that learning does result in discrete changes in 'wiring,'" said Marta Flaum, whose practice in Chappaqua, N.Y. specializes in diagnosing and helping children with dyslexia and other language handicaps. "It would make sense that learning a second language affects brain changes as well." However, Flaum said, "we know that the young brain is more plastic than the older brain, making it easier to learn at an earlier age."
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