Friday Link Love: Some studies on early language acquisition

 
Some further weekend reading, for those of you interested in language development in particular:

At some point this week, in the comments section, someone voiced their worry that they may have already missed the "sensitive window" for exposing their child to a second language. I think it was Chaosgirl and she wondered, like so many of us have, if earlier is better in terms of the ease with which children might be able to acquire a second language. So, I had to laugh when I recently read this. Apparently, kids are starting to get the sense of their first language IN UTERO. I can just see it now: There will be big ol' fuzzy headphones made for pregnant women to put on their bellies and pipe in podcasts of people speaking several of their favourite languages.

And then there's this article: I remember being an undergrad and having coffee at my hip little cafe DECADES ago and secretly cringing at all that syrupy high-pitched chatter that I used to hear new moms use with their babies. "I'LL never be that RIDICULOUS with my babies" I thought. Thankfully, I got over myself because all that "motherese" (as developmentalists like to call it) actually HELPS children acquire language better than when we use our normal "adult" voices.

Finally, picking up on the earlier discussion about bilingualism, here's a fascinating article showing how bilingual infants learn words differently than monolingual children. They seem to use different strategies, given that their "cognitive load" is heavier. These differences mean that bilingual children often can't detect slight differences if words are very similar-sounding, so they often look like they're lagging behind their monlingual peers. But this strategy seems adaptive to learning, and perfecting, two different languages in the long run.

And then, there's THIS doozy of a early language experience (thanks Julie!)!  A man spent the first three years of his son's life speaking only in KLINGON to him... Being the Star Trek fan that I am (SHUT UP), I wasn't as appalled as some may be.

-- Isabela

Comments

[Mary]

I don't know about Klingon, but I am raising my son to be bilingual - English/Italian. He's now 17 months old and the interesting thing is that he chooses a word in one language and that's the one he uses. He understands both languages, but only speaks the words he has chosen. He says acqua (water) and 'siccia (for salsiccia/sausage) but apple, pear, shoe, etc. He says ear, but he knows it's orecchio - the same with eye/occio. It doesn't matter what language he's addressed in, so far he only speaks the word in the language he has chosen.

[Mary]

Oops, a typo - it's eye/occhio...

[paola]

Wow, that article on bilingual infants was a doozy!! My understanding was that thru similar sounding words bilingual children can build their lexicon. However as there are few similar sounding (words that have only one sound difference like pot and hot, for example)'first' words, it takes longer for them to build a vocabulary. Am I right Isabela, or way off???

However, the main message I got from that article was the enormous difficulty in learning language if you happen to be bilingual. Little people are freaking geniuses!

@Mary - my kids are also bilingual Italian/English (I'm in Milan BTW) and my son, now almost 5, did the same thing for quite a while. He seemed to like particular sounding words and even if I corrected him he would still use that particular word (for example he loved the word 'palla' more than 'ball'). This changed when his vocab grew, but even now he will say a full sentence in English, but throw in that one word in Italian that he knows better, or likes better, than the English, say.

[fahmi]

We are raising our kids to be bilingual, Bangla and English. We started them with sign, so for a while, they were managing three languages. It was actually pretty cool, because sign helped them bridge the gap between the two languages. "Oh, that sign is used with 'hat' and for 'tupi' so it must be the same thing."

Our older son understood both from the start, but spoke exclusively in Bangla up until he started sentences. So he would use his two, three word phrases, vocabulary all in Bangla, and then one day, he woke up talking in sentences...in English. And now about a year later, while he understands Bangla, refuses to speak any of it. Except for a word here or there.

The little one is currently preferring sign and Bangla. We will see how that goes.

@paola - I know that was the case for us, that because both languages were being introduced at once, our boys are slower language wise to start. My pediatrician was not worried at all, while I was watching his Bangla-only cousins or English-only friends yammering away.

[Becky]

So, I'm very aware of all the benefits of parent-ese but I have to say the promotion of it drives me a bit batty. It seems like instead of encouraging parents to use appropriate modifications of language which, in fact, SHOULD be instinctual and not require any instruction at all, it instead gives people (might I mention my MIL?) an excuse for grating ridiculousness. Using phrases such as "Him's hungry" and "I sowwy" isn't actually parent-ese but insetad modeling poor/bizzare grammar and articulation. It seems like there is a hunk of the population that feels parent-ese is another name for the cutsey-wootsey imagined language patterns of young children instead of an explanation of why we do what we already do in an unforced and natural manner. /end rant

[Isabela]

@paola: right with the interpretation of the study! And absolutely: little people are geniuses; the incredible flexibility of our brains that early on NEVER ceases to amaze me.

@Becky: I HATE that type of talk too (particularly from my SIL), although I have to admit that I use terms for my "babies" that are so HORRIFYINGLY cutesy, something I NEVER expected of myself.