How kids become bilingual.

[Skuu]

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.

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by alanX

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.

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.

[xYinniex]

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

[NanteNa]

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.

[Tenchu]

Originally Posted by TheLastFortnight

Quite interesting. In Portuguese we don't have those "th" sounds the /θ/ and the /ð/, in the words "death" and "father". People here usually pronounce them as "t" and "d", unless you explain to them how to do, but I know how, of course ^_^

"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...

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by NanteNa

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.

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

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by Tenchu

"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...

"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.

[NanteNa]

Originally Posted by KyleGoetz

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

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?

[komitsuki]

Originally Posted by TheLastFortnight

However, the English pronounce is really a pain, without the IPA, I can't really know how to pronounce the words, since it's pronounced completely different from the way it's written sometimes.

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

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by komitsuki

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.