Relearning a forgotten language is easier for those under 40
A small study involving 7 native English speakers who had learned either Hindi or Zulu as children when living abroad, but now had no memory of the neglected language, found that the three who were under 40 could relearn certain phonemes that are difficult for native English speakers to recognize, but those over 40, like those who had never been exposed to the language in childhood, could not. The amount of experience of exposure in childhood ranged from 4 to 10 years, and it’s especially notable that the 47-year old individual who had 10 years exposure, having become almost fluent, still could not recover the ability to distinguish these difficult sounds. It should also be noted that where the ability was recovered (and recovered almost to native ability), it took about 15-20 training sessions. The findings point to the value of early foreign language learning.
Language learning declines after second year of life
A study involving 96 deaf children who had received cochlear implants during their first four years of life has found that the rate of language learning was greatest for those given implants before they turned two. Children given implants at three or four years of age acquired language skills more slowly. The finding supports the idea that there is a ‘sensitive period’ for language learning, and suggests that deaf children should get cochlear implants sooner (it is still relatively rare for them to be given to children younger than two).
The findings were presented on 16 May at the Acoustical Society of America conference in Vancouver, Canada.
Learning a second language may not be as laborious as believed
A study of adult learners of a second language has revealed that their brains still possess a surprising facility for learning words — much greater than the learner is consciously aware of. College students learning first-year French demonstrated brain activity that was clearly discriminating between real and pseudo-French words after only 14 hours of classroom instruction, although the students performed only at chance levels when asked to consciously choose whether or not the stimuli were real French words. The greater the exposure to French, the larger the difference in brain response to words and pseudo words.
Second language best taught in childhood
Sadly, it does appear that the easiest time to learn a second language is, indeed, in childhood. An imaging study has found that when grammatical judgment in the second language was compared to grammatical judgment in first language (as evidenced by performance on sentences with grammatical mistakes), there was no difference in brain activation in those who learned the second language as children. However, people who acquired the second language late and with different proficiency levels displayed significantly more activity in the Broca’s region during second language grammatical processing. “This finding suggests that at the level of brain activity, the parallel learning of the two languages since birth or the early acquisition of a second language are crucial in the setting of the neural substrate for grammar.”
Study finds there’s a critical time for learning all languages, including sign language
It is generally believed that there is a critical period for learning a first language, and that children not exposed to language during this period will never fully acquire language. It is also thought that this might apply as well to second language learning — that those who learn another language after puberty can never become as fluent as those who learn it before puberty. A recent study suggests that this may also be true for non-verbal languages. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it was found that patterns of brain activity in bilingual people who learned American Sign Language (ASL) before puberty differed from those who learned it after puberty.
This article is provided by Christian Lingua.