Early Babe Catches the Word (Article from the magazine Dallas Child)
|
Alyssa Hanson grew frustrated. Her 2-year-old daughter Brooke refused to obey her. She wouldn't respond when called she'd turn and walls away when addressed. Alyssa was at her wit's end. Could it be her hearing? A "visit to the doctor and a battery of tests led to a clean bill of health. Could her daughter be developmentally delayed? The answer came one day in the midst of practicing Spanish with a friend who'd come to study at Alyssa's home. "Ven, nifia pequenia!" said Alyssa. And, guess what? Brooke came running. Surprised, the young mother tried another command: "Siéntate." Brooke sat down on the floor and smiled up at her eyes bright to finally be able to communicate with her mother. Alyssa put her head down on the table and cried. Her daughter wasn't mentally handicapped; she was linguistically challenged From the time Brooke was only a few weeks old she'd been in family home care while Alyssa worked. When Alyssa decided to enroll in evening school to complete her master's degree in order to better provide for her family she hadn't considered all the consequences of being away from her child for so many hours each day. Brooke's caretaker spoke Spanish exclusively and the constant interaction meant English melted away from Brooke's world. Unbeknownst to Alyssa her little daughter's brain was a tiny lingual factory that required constant and persistent stimulation. With proper care a baby's brain is capable of processing multiple languages with minimal effort. The keyas Alyssa discovered is regular exposure and usage of all languages that are introduced. Citizens of the World Patricia Kuhl, Ph.D., a speech scientist at the University of Washington explains that babies are born "citizens of the world" in that they can distinguish differences among sounds (temporal, spectral and duration cues) borrowed from all languages. They are ready to learn any language they hear, but by 6 months of age, they start to specialize in their native or home-spoken language. "As a child's brain, thinking skills and motor systems develop, so does his understanding and use of language to communicate," adds Maria L. Munoz, Ph.D., assistant professor of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Tennessee. The first sign of readiness for language starts with normal babbling at around 3 months of age. This should be a parent's cue to involve the baby in daily conversation. A baby's brain doubles in size in the first year; so engage your child in constant, verbal communication while doing tasks such as diapering, feeding, playing on walking. Observe closely; an intricate process of retention is going on in their brain. The child is like a thirsty sponge - absorbing, understanding, retaining and processing-the neural tissue in their brain is able ro seek out language patterns long before they are ever able to utter their first word. Melanie J. Spence, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas (collaborating with Dr. David Moore at Pitzer College) is involved in groundbreaking research called the Infant Learning Project, which matches age with abilities. According to their study, babies learn the impact of their actions rapidly - such as how to influence people and objects around them. "I have been studying babies' abilities to categorize different patterns of infantdirected speech used by adults to convey messages,"says Spence "This research suggests that a baby's ability to categorize language patterns develops between 4 and 6 months of age." If you wait until a child is in high schooto introduce another language, you have lost the precious time when their fledgling brains are primed to process new information. The learning window for developing any complex lingual system has dosed. Brain plasticity has been lost, the number nsynapses has greatly reduced, and the brain no longer has the same facility to restructure itself. In fact, researchers now say the: a child taught a second language after a., 10 is unlikely to even speak it like a native. The young child's brain, on the other hand, is a rapidly evolving dynamic orgarFor instance, a child of age 2 has twice se many connections or synapses in the bra:as an adult. Furthermore, when a language is introduced later in life, the brain tends apply the established language's gramme:cal rules to the second language and so achieving proficiency in the new language becomes more challenging. Some parents hold back the on the native language, while others minimize the minority tongue-the argument for the former being that when the child eventually goes to school, he will learn English, anyway. Those children do by far the poorest, because they have passed key ages of language development where the brain is setting up the neurostructures for language, according to Laura-Ann Petitto, EA.D., a cognitive neurosciemisr at Dartmouth College research. How can parents assist in the early development of language in their children? "Some experts say that a second language shouldn't be introduced until a child has a firm grasp of a primary language," says Petitto. "But we found that early bilingual exposure is better." According to her study, when children are exposed to two languages from a very early age, they grow as if there were two monolinguals housed in one brain, and this will occur without any of the dreaded "language contamination" often attributed to early bilingual exposure. Converse, Talk, Read, Engage In a home where parents know multiple languages or where there is a non-English-speaking caregiver, they can each choose a language and converse with the children solely in that language. Researchers now believe that this helps children acquire fluency faster. The exposure has to be systematic and very rich, insists Petitto. Parents also need to consider how to strike a balance between the different languages spoken and understood at home. If a child is in a setting like family rue or school and hears one language all day, then he has only a short time to listen and practice the other at home. In such cases, the language that a child is strongly exposed to is processed faster and takes deeper roots than the home language, as was seen in Brooke's case. Once Alyssa identified the communication barrier between her daughter and herself, she worked hard to resolve it. "We would go around the house, touching and pointing to objects, Brooke would identify them in Spanish and I'd give her an English word for it," says Alyssa. "She loved the word game and it gave us back our lost language." Parents also need to set up opportunities for encouragement and approval. Taking the children to cultural events and settings where the y• are able to freely demonstrate their linguistic acquisition and converse with varied individuals leads to the strengthening of such skills. Also, it is helpful to reinforce language skills with rhymes, music and word games. Remember that children, especially babies,. learn very- fast and they forget just as fast. Thus usage and repetition is very important. Says Spence, "Six-weekolds who hear their mothers read a nursery rhyme repeatedly meognize some aspects of that nursery rhyme three days after having last heard it." For Urmila, a stay•-ar-home mom, what worked was daily reading. She got a hoard of board books in her mother tongue, Hindi, and read to 3-year-old Aryan day in and day out. "We cuddle in bed and read at night. I read to him when he is splashing around in the tub. I read to him in the playroom. And when we aren't reading, I sing songs to him in my [native] language. It seems to have worked," reports Urmfa. "He loves the language now and converses freely in it." Why a Second (or Third) language? In our rapidly changing world, communication barriers are dropping and we are becoming a more diverse and culturally conscious society. There is an emerging need for children to be profcient in more than just the academics. In the 1990 Census, Texas accounted for nearly 8 percent of the 19.8 million foreign-born residents in the United States. That means that in Texas alone, 1.5 million live in households where languages other than English are spoken. Today, our children are expected to be global communicators and speak more languages to expand their intercultural views and to be understood in such a diverse society. Nowadays, even parents who are not bi- or multilin-gual are helping their children learn more languages. Although English speaking, Nicole, a Dallas work-fromhome sales executive, wanted her preschool son to be familiar with Spanish. Fortunately for her, she found a Spanish-speaking nanny to take care of the boy. "Now that I have a 3-month-old daughter as well, it has worked out great," she says. "I think it's very important for children m know more than one language. It's the best gift you can give to them." More languages = Smarter kids Researchers have discovered that children who are exposed to two languages from the start are more flexible and creative, and they reach high levels of cognitive development at an earlier age than their monolingual peers. Additionally, they have an unusual readiness to learn and a heightened cultural and language awareness. Monique Bournot-Trites, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, discovered that children who attended French immersion faced no difficulty differentiating and switching between two or even three languages. Furthermore, if they had a good foundation in their basic language, the process of learning another only facilitated the learning of the first. This explains why Karl and Marisel's 3-year-old son, Nathan, knows when he is at his grandparents' home, that although they communicate with each other in English, grandpa prefers to converse in Spanish and grandma knows only a handful of Spanish words. Even at his young age, he is smart enough to switch language modes when addressing the two. The most fascinating account comes from Petitto, who has spent 29 years researching the biological and environmental factors that affect how humans acquire language and how language is organized in the brain. "We're finding that ... young children who have rich and early exposure to two languages are ... cognitively more advanced than their monolingual peers on certain highly sophisticated cognitive tasks having to do with attention and abstract reasoning," she reports. According to an article on reading research in the American Psychological Association's (APA) journal Developmental Psychology knowing a second language can help a child comprehend written languages faster and possibly learn to read more easily. "Preschoolers who speak one language can usually recite the alphabet and spell their names but cannot read without the help of pictures. But bilingual preschoolers can read sooner because they are able to recognize symbolic relations between letters/characters and sounds without having visual objects," concludes Ellen Bialystok, Ph.D., of York University. Sheila Abdullah The power to learn language is so great in the young child, that it doesn't seem to matter how many languages you throw their way ... they can learn as many spoken languages as you can allow them to hear systematically and regularly. Susan Curtiss |