[lg policy] Pathways Seen for Acquiring Languages: Newer Research Counters Myths, Points to Benefits of Multilingualism

[Harold Schiffman]

Pathways Seen for Acquiring Languages

Newer Research Counters Myths, Points to Benefits of Multilingualism

By Sarah D. Sparks

New studies on how language learning occurs are beginning to chip away
at some long-held notions about second-language acquisition and point
to potential learning benefits for students who speak more than one
language. “We have this national psyche that we’re not good at
languages,” said Marty Abbott, the director of education for the
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, in Alexandria,
Va. “It’s still perceived as something only smart people can do, and
it’s not true; we all learned our first language and we can learn a
second one.”

New National Science Foundation-funded collaborations among educators,
cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and linguists
have started to find the evidence to back up that assertion. For
example, researchers long thought the window for learning a new
language shrinks rapidly after age 7 and closes almost entirely after
puberty. Yet interdisciplinary research conducted over the past five
years at the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University,
and other colleges suggest that the time frame may be more flexible
than first thought and that students who learn additional languages
become more adaptable in other types of learning, too.

“There has been an explosion of research on bilingual-language
processing,” said Judith F. Kroll, the principal investigator for the
Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain project launched this month at Penn
State’s Center for Language Science in University Park, Pa. The
five-year, $2.8 million project is intended to bring together
neuroscientists, linguists, and cognitive scientists to compare the
brain and mental processes of different types of bilingual people,
such as a Mandarin-English speaker whose languages include different
writing systems or a deaf English speaker whose signed and written
languages involve different modes of communication.

Distinguishing Sounds

During the first year of life, a baby starts to specialize in the
sounds of his native language and becomes less able to distinguish
sounds common only to other languages. University of Washington
researchers exposed 9-month-old American babies of
native-English-speaking parents to sounds associated with Mandarin
either through sessions with a native-Mandarin-speaking tutor or video
or audio lessons. At 12 months, babies who had worked with a person
recognized Mandarin sounds more accurately than did infants who were
exposed to the language through video or audio only.

Likewise, the Washington-based American Association for the
Advancement of Science has added a symposium on bilingualism to its
2011 annual conference in February, and the Seattle-based University
of Washington this May opened the world’s first brain-imaging center
adapted to study language and cognition in infants and young children.
“Bilingualism provides a lens for researchers to examine aspects of
the underlying cognitive architecture that are otherwise obscured by
native-language skill,” Ms. Kroll said.

New Techniques

The increased use of neuroscience in language-acquisition research has
been fueled in part by the development of brain-imaging equipment
scaled for tiny brains and squirmy bodies, according to Patricia K.
Kuhl, a co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for
Learning and Brain Sciences, known as I-LABS. The technology has
enabled scientists over the past decade to start to paint a picture of
how language learning affects a child’s brain.

Among the new techniques is magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which maps
brain activity by measuring the magnetic fields produced by the
brain’s electrical currents. The I-LABS machine’s sensors use a unique
global positioning system to correct the resulting image for the
child’s head movements. In a series of experiments, Ms. Kuhl and her
team studied American infants of English-speaking parents between the
ages of 6 and 12 months. During the first year, the team found the
auditory and motor regions of the brain start to react more in
response to speech, as opposed to other sounds.

“They are mapping the language, so the faster they can map those
critical sounds, the faster their language is going to grow,” she
said. “Babies start out as citizens of the world; they can
discriminate the sounds of any language.” Yet during about a two-month
window from 8- to 10-months-old, the team found babies start to
specialize in sounds from their native language. For instance, an
English-speaking baby will get better at hearing the difference
between the often-used “l” and “r” sounds, while a Japanese baby,
whose native language does not differentiate between the sounds, will
get worse at hearing the difference.

Since the initial experiments, the researchers have drilled down into
exactly what sort of experience props open that language-learning
window.
For example, when babies born to native-English-speaking parents
played three times a week during that window with a
native-Mandarin-speaking tutor, at 12 months, they had progressed in
their ability to recognize both English and Mandarin sounds, rather
than starting to retrench in the non-native language. By contrast,
children exposed only to audio or video recordings of native speakers
showed no change in their language trajectory. Brain-imaging of the
same children backed up the results of test-based measures of language
specialization.

The research may not immediately translate into a new language arts
curriculum, but it has already deepened the evidence for something
most educators believe: Social engagement, particularly with speakers
of multiple languages, is critical to language learning. Social and
emotional areas of the brain mediate language areas, but only now—with
a MEG that can correct for the child’s head movement—are researchers
starting to measure those neural connections.

“When we can connect language regions with social-emotional regions
with executive functions, we’ll have a picture of the whole system,”
said Gina C. Lebedeva, the translation outreach and education director
for I-LABS. “The key to that series of studies is exposure and live
interactions with native speakers,” Ms. Lebedeva said. “The
interactions need to be naturalistic: eye contact, gestures,
exaggerated phonemes.”

Earlier Exposure

With the opening this summer of I-LABS’ $7 million MEG brain imaging
center, Ms. Kuhl and lab co-director Andrew Meltzoff will launch a new
phase of research. The Developing Mind Project is studying how
people’s brain and cognitive processes change during key transition
periods: infancy and early childhood, puberty, and old age.

Ms. Abbott said she hopes such research will help persuade education
officials to provide more second-language instruction for all students
in early grades, as opposed to the traditional secondary school
courses.

“Just around the time when most students in this country, if they
study a language, are starting that process, they’re becoming less
likely to be able to make those native-like sounds in another
language,” Ms. Abbott said.

Ms. Kuhl and Ms. Lebedeva agreed. “I think we may be able to draw a
new [language learning] curve that’s not so age-dependent,” Ms. Kuhl
said. “Learning itself in early development is so profound, and the
neural architecture stays with you throughout your life.”

Other studies also suggest that learning multiple languages from early
childhood on may provide broader academic benefits, too.

For example, at the science-oriented Ultimate Block Party held in New
York City this month, children of different backgrounds played games
in which they were required to sort toys either by shape or color,
based on a rule indicated by changing flashcards. A child sorting blue
and yellow ducks and trucks by shape, say, might suddenly have to
switch to sorting them by color. The field games exemplified research
findings that bilingual children have greater cognitive flexibility
than monolingual children. That is, they can adapt better than
monolingual children to changes in rules—for example the criteria used
to sort the toys—and close out mental distractions.

Ms. Abbot, who has supervised foreign-language programs for
early-elementary students in Fairfax County, Va., said she saw exactly
that sort of flexibility in problem-solving among the young students
in the district’s partial-immersion program, in which both
English-speaking students and speakers of other languages spend part
of the school day learning in a second language.

“A bilingualist,” Ms. Kroll said, “is a mental juggler.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/10/27/09window_ep-2.h30.html?tkn=WYUFfZkVSTncjdxz8PdWiR0j9MeVYNhI25rc&print=1


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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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