Module 4: Baby Talk (by Alexys Manring)

            When I started speaking Spanish for the first time, I was fourteen and just started high school. I knew little about the language besides “Hola, me llamo Alexys”, various family relations and animals. Therefore, I did not have anything close to a Spanish accent or any expertise in pronouncing certain sounds in the language. I could roll my r’s and learn how to read aloud “n” versus “ñ”, but to convincingly pull off a sentence in Spanish was difficult for me to achieve—unless I dared to get laughable looks from friends and teachers. Reading and writing Spanish had become just like English to me, but speaking was a whole new level. Why?    

To simply put it: I was not raised with the sounds of the Spanish language when I was younger and thus will always have a “foreign accent,” no matter how hard I try.

It has been concluded by many different studies that infants under the age of one acquire the necessary skills and sounds associated with a certain language easier than adults. While older people can still learn languages other than their native one, it seems impossible to master sound patterns. For example, Professor Corey, after publishing a Hindi-English dictionary, receiving excellent reviews, and teaching phonemics for many years, still gets the same response, “You speak Hindi excellently for an American!” (Scovel 1969). This is because young children undergo a process called “fast mapping,” in which an infant has a steep learning curve to make the connections between the brain’s neurons in order to grasp their native language. In order to do this, the child has to be extremely sensitive and malleable to understand every sound made. Their growing perception of speech is therefore shaped by an increase favoring of their native language and a loss of ability notice non-native contrasts (Nathan, Wells & Donlan 1998).

In 1995, an experiment called the Jusczky’s Head Turn Experiment was tested. Six-month-old and nine-month-old American infants were evaluated based on their interest in the speaking of different languages via their heads turning, the languages being either English or Dutch. While the six-month-olds showed no preference between the languages, it was very clear that the nine-month-olds showed more attention towards the English list (Jusczky, et. al 1995).

This data brings another question to the table: what about bilingual or multilingual children? Surely there would be a difference in the way they grow up, having learned the sounds of multiple languages instead of one. A study done at the University of Washington revealed the developmental differences between bilingual and monolingual infants that ranged from six to twelve months in age. Like Jusczky’s Head Turn Experiment, the older monolingual infants failed to show interest in a second language. The bilingual infants, however, continued to be engaged when introduced to new sounds and languages. Some researchers are calling bilingual children to be “more cognitively flexible” than the monolingual (Klass 2011).

Furthermore, when children adopted into other countries and cultures (i.e. Korean infants being adopted by Dutch families), they still retain the knowledge and sounds already acquired in their early life. These children’s response times to different sounds were then compared with other children who strictly grew up in the Dutch culture. Over the course of thirteen training sessions, the two groups of children were tested on identifying and speaking various sounds. The results of the trial revealed that the Korean-born children significantly outperformed the Dutch-born, no matter the age of the participants. The researchers concluded that exposure to a second language, even when a child is less than six months and removed from that culture, is still crucial to them being able to listen to and produce speech efficiently (Choi, Cutler & Broersma 2017).

Although investigations are still being done to examine the long-term effects of being bilingual versus monolingual, the stark difference in infants has already shown that there is clearly an advantage. Learning multiple languages is enabling children to keep themselves more open-minded and better at communicating, which could definitely spread to more qualities over the course of their lives.

References

Choi, Jiyoun, Anne Cutler, and Mirjam Broersma. 2017. Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception-production transfer of birth-language memory. rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org. Accessed February 9, 2017.

Klass, Perri. 2011. Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language. www.nytimes.com. Accessed February 6, 2017.

Jusczky, et. al. 1995. The Head-Turn Preference Procedure for Testing Auditory Perception. Infant Behavior and Development. 18. 111-116.

Nathan, Liz, Bill Wells and Chris Donlan. 1998. Children’s comprehension of unfamiliar regional accents: a preliminary investigation. J. Child Lang. 25. 343-365.

Scovel, Tom. 1969. Foreign Accents, Language Acquisition, and Cerebral Dominance. Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Studies. 19. 245-253.