How kids become bilingual.
 

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.

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.

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.

While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.

Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.

Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.

But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.

Full article: Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily - Yahoo! News

The first point (about the critical age) is hardly news. I was taught this in Linguistics 101 my freshman year in college 7 years ago. The second point (the motherese computer program) is interesting and I'd never heard of this before.

I don't know if this relates to the topic, but I was staying with my host family in Japan back in Dec '08/Jan '09 and they were asking me about different sounds.

I showed them what I do with my tongue and lips slowly when I say sounds like "L" and "R" and also "th..." and I noticed a marked improvement in their pronunciation when they knew how to manipulate their mouth.

This is old news

Really? I must be time traveling.

Seems to me it was written yesterday.

By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard, Ap Medical Writer – Tue Jul 21, 3:08 am ET

this stuff has been in books for a while.im just surprise how the media is so behind in some stuff

Yeah, the Thais cannot say "R" or "L" either. The sound they produce is a cross between the two.

They also struggle with "TH" sounds, and "V" sounds, and any sound that is on the end of the word. For example, I'm having my wife read to me, I force her to exagerate all last sounds like:

"AnD the caT waS a fuc*ing gay faggoT because he haD no braiN."

She'll never get it, otherwise.

We're supposed to be spawning soon. I'll have the mongrel runt listen to me reading stories every night in order to make sure his English is going to be up to scratch.

This research is new. Have you read the article? Please read the article before saying things like "this is old." etc. Thanks.





KyleGoatz, yes. The first is pretty much common sense, but this new thing about computer programs is definitely new to me. I've never heard of such a program. I actually watched a documentary on these "make your baby smarter" programs on the Discovery Channel a few days ago.

Something I might take a shot at with my child, as I want him/her to be bilingual.

And these experiments done with Japanese babies and Western babies is quite interesting, as well.

HA!
That's quite funny.

Do you plan to teach him two languages? Or just English? Kind of weird question, but I don't know what you're native language is.

My fiancee is Japanese, if we have a child of our own, I will definitely try my hardest to make sure he/she is bilingual. Even if I have to go as far as making him "listen to sessions of consecutive L's and R's" as the article states.
:mtongue:

I'm Australian born. I speak English.

I live in Thailand, and will raise brood here.

Their dominant language is going to be English, regardless I'll be the only one around them who properly speaks it. But of course, they'll also be learning Thai. So yes, a billingual.

When you have scientific studies like this, the way they're summarised and reported by a medic outlet isn't necessarily the main thing they were about. Scientists tend to do specific research on topics that haven't been thoroughly understood. This area of linguistics is such a topic.

So you may hear something on the news and say, 'huh? didn't we already know that?' but you may only think that due to vague/incomplete previous research that was touted as a new fact by the way it was reported.

I'm not entirely sure what people are calling old; the ease of language learning with prepubescents was known and probably wasn't the focus of the study. This was more likely the ease of learning using the 'lessons' for older children.

Also remember that in science, v. rarely does a single study prove a theory, even if it is well controlled and produces very strong results. Although it does depend on the presumed probability of the mechanism behind the result being true, e.g. it's quite likely that even older children can still learn another language relatively easy, but this isn't proven. So a single, strong study could nearly prove this.

You don't need the program with your kid. Babies are born with a blank slate and can hear every difference just fine. Provided you start them hearing both languages when they're infants, you're golden without needing any extra stuff to preserve their ability to discern sounds.

For example, there are two different "p" sounds in English, the "p" in "happen" (non-aspirated) and the "p" in "pen" (aspirated). An English speaker would hear and treat them the same, but a Hindi speaker would hear them as different sounds because in Hindi, the two sounds are separate phonemes, but in English they are the same phoneme. This means that the sounds don't change meaning of words in English, but they do in Hindi.

Thus, native speakers of English treat the sounds as the same and as they age they lose the ability to hear the difference. Hindi speakers remain attuned to the sonic difference and thus never lose the ability.

This exact same phenomenon is why English speakers retain the ability to hear the difference between "l" and "r" while Japanese people lose the ability.

tl;dr The program is absolutely unnecessary if you raise your kid from birth bilingually (or multilingually). E.g., my girlfriend's sister is raising her kid trilingually (grandparents = Mandarin, mother = Spanish, father and home country surroundings = English). My girlfriend was likewise raised quasi-trilingually (parents = Mandarin and Taiwanese, home country surroundings = Spanish). Just becaues her parents swapped Mandarin and Taiwanese without any set rules, my girlfriend's grasp of the distinction between the two is a bit tenuous.

When raising your kid bilingually, set some type of separation between the languages. You can have the parents exclusively use a different language when one-on-one with the kid. There was a famous Indian mathematician whose family in India had a three story house, and so had a rule: English on floor one, Hindi on floor two, French on floor three. The family's children were fluent in all three.

My cousin speaks cantonese and english and he's 2.
It's quite cute really. surprisingly, he doesn't get it mixed up.

I was born in Denmark, obviously speaks Danish fluent. I grew up in a home with a lot of English sung music, so I picked up a lot from a very young age. I speak it rather fluent by now. I also speak German, not completely fluent tho, but I taught myself that. My dad's family learn languages easily, so I guess I picked up on that as a little kid. I always had it easier learning languages than abstract things like chemistry and maths.

I'm definitely planning on teaching my kids all the languages I'll eventually learn (I'm planning on studying Korean and moving to South Korea for a while). That means they'll probably speak four languages.. Kinda..

Yin@ That's quite impressive. O_O I mix languages all the time.

"TH" is quite an easy sound to teach, I find. Easy to explain; put your tongue at your teeth, blow a little, then continue with the rest of the word.

My wife's so cute learning: "... Thhh... Thhh... Thde."

It is teaching "V" that is hard. How do I turn "Wictory" into "Victory"? Or "R". The best I can do to bring the "R" sound out is practice dog growling sounds...

It's interesting that you call chemistry abstract and grammar not abstract.

"V" is a voiced, labiodental fricative, meaning you put your lower lip (labio) to upper teeth (dental), cause air to go out your mouth with a stream between the teeth and lips (fricative) and have your voicebox vibrate (voiced).

If she can do an "f" then tell her that the change is like changing the "t" to a "d" because all you need to do from there is to vibrate the voicebox. T->D is just like F->V.

Actually I wrote ''grammar and maths'' to begin with, but I assumed that some people would get confused as I claim to learn languages easily. Did that make sense?

Thank the GVS (Great Vowel Shift) in the British history between and around 1450 and 1750.

I actually read a linguistics article a couple years ago in which a linguist had devised a set of phonetic/orthographic rules for English that describes with about 97-98% accuracy how to pronounce English words. It's just that the rule set was a lot more complicated than something like Spanish.

Absorption/immersion and having bilingual parents are the most common ways.

For those interested in the research that started this thread. Patricia Kuhl is one of the leading experts in infant language acquisition. This research is important in many ways : treating autism, AI and getting robots to speak to us and also bilingualism. check it out at I-LABS: Patricia Kuhl, Ph.D. - Research

That's cute :-)

My son is getting their with his Japanese and English, and he just knows that English is with me and JP on her side.

I'm Scottish so my L sounds are bad anyway but I somehow get by.

I remember my ex girlfriend always said she thought it was cute how I said my L sounds. Even when she showed me how to do it, my tongue didn't want to move in that direction and I couldn't do it. I definitely find the Japanese らりるれろ sounds (they sound closer to L sounds than R sounds in my opinion) easier than the English L sound as it's a completely different tongue movement as far as I can tell.

Also let's hope my Japanese らりるれろ is okay. Luckily I was pleased at a Japanese casual evening I went to a week or two ago when I was told my pronunciation was good.

You are Australian, and your "wife" is Korean. You're child does not speak Japanese. Give it up

Is it a bad thing to teach one's child another language, even if they are not of that race?

My son's mother and my X-Wife are divorced. Yes she is Japanese.

My now partner is Korean.

........................................

"Your"

Well, my dad is English and my mother is Dutch, I am fluent in both languages, I heard English speaking on TV and (had to) talk to my english grandparents from since when I was little. I dunno if it is just me, but now I find learning other languages really easy (and fun ofcourse). So I think if you are bilingual, it's easier to learn new languages/to be open to them.
Also, we get French in school, in which I am quite fluent too, but half of our country (Belgium) is French so I come in contact with it nearly every day (Does that make me trilingual?)

Sorry if this has nothing to do with the topic but, just wanna add this to the conversation y'know

Being bilingual is extremely EASY! Most people that are minorities in a country will speak their own language and that of the country they reside (if they have their own language that is).

For me, I've always been fluent in Arabic and Kabyle. Kabyle being my mother tongue, and Arabic the language of Algeria and kids in the street. By age 7, I was half decent in French from TV and the fact that French influence was still alive in Algeria. Moved to England at 7ish and was able to translate basic notions to my parents after 3 months and after 1 year, I was in a higher English class than most people in my year group. This is pretty normal for most Kabyle Algerians. Those that haven't managed to move abroad to learn another language will still speak fluently Kabyle, Arabic and French. For those that count Dialects as a different "language", Kabyle Algerians are all genuises. lol.

I think it's always been clear that languages are very easy to pick up as a kid. From watching DBZ and Knights of the Zodiac and other animes in French, I was able to communicate with relative ease to my cousins in France, in French at the age of 7. God knows how it's picked up, but the majority of kids learn languages like it's nothing!