In this week's module, Amy briefly discussed the acquisition of accents in the very early stages of childhood. This blog post is meant as a short exposition behind the development of these accents, and how this process might function. This just happened to be something I found interesting during the lecture, and I'm hoping that after expanding upon it a bit you do as well. - AJ
In a lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, a six month old child sits atop his mother's lap, listening to a series of sounds spoken towards him.
"La, la, la, la, ra-"
There. The signal he was waiting for. He turns his head to face a black box, a cube of one way mirrors hiding a stuffed bear from view. If he timed his turn just right, the box will light up, and much to his delight, he will get to see the bear beat on a drum and put on a little dance.
This odd display is an experiment in linguistics, the brainchild of Dr. Patricia Kuhl, Professor and Co-Director of the UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. For years, she has been studying the mechanisms by which babies much too young to speak on their own may be imprinted with the markers typical of their primary household language. Her process for doing so is fairly straightforward; train the subjects of her study to turn their heads for a reward (the little drumming bear) when they hear a sound that is different from those that came immediately before it. Hypothetically, this should be a simple task for a child who is still in the crucial region of development relating to accent and understanding the basic patterns of what is to become their primary language, and it should be much more difficult for a child who has passed this point and whose primary language does not differentiate between the sounds.
Take for example the comparative performance between American and Japanese infants tasked with identifying the difference between an English 'r' and 'l' sound, as mentioned at the opening of this post. Dr. Kuhl and her colleagues found that these children had a nearly identical ability to differentiate these sounds at ages 6-8 months. By 10-12 months, American infants had improved upon this ability, while Japanese infants showed a sharp decline in performance when tasked with telling the two sounds apart.
Dr. Kuhl theorizes that infants, though not yet capable of fully realized speech, are still very much engaged with the languages they are exposed to on a regular basis. She suggests that they are actively filtering the sounds they hear, taking stock of the frequency at which they are spoken and adapting to better recognize frequently used sounds in their primary household language. With this in mind, a secondary experiment was launched, wherein American infants with English as a primary household language were exposed to Mandarin during the critical period between the ranges of 6-8 and 10-12 months of age. When the American infants were exposed to Mandarin-specific sounds, they performed just as well in identifying them as did Taiwanese infants with Mandarin as their primary household language.
For more detailed information on this set of experiments, I recommend you click here to watch Dr. Kuhl's 2010 TEDx talk, where she discusses the information I have summarized above, and goes onto mention the potential applications of medical imaging in identifying the formation of accents and language patterns.
Dr. Kuhl's research into the topic is far from the only foray into developing theories regarding the formation of language patterns in early infancy, but it is certainly one of the most interesting ones. Some evidence, including a 2009 publication in the journal Current Biology, suggest a meaningful correlation between the patterns of a baby's cry and the primary language of the mother, suggesting that language learning may, to some extent, begin in the womb.
It is hardly surprising, then, that something so deeply ingrained in a person's speech from their earliest days would be so difficult to re-learn when learning a second language. Certainly, as the aforementioned study and the common sense of most would find reasonable, there is some allowance for fluency in the two or more languages spoken by an individual born into a multilingual household. After this critical period, however, it is less and less likely that a native speaker of one language will be able to easily make distinctions between sounds in another language that to them are the same. In our first year, we learn what to hear when we listen to our primary language spoken aloud; after our brains trim some of the fat from the first year of stimuli, we also learn what not to hear. This is what gives our dialects and idiolects their unique flavor and song, from our first year through the rest of our lives.
Works Cited:
Hopkin, Christopher, and Karen Hopkin. Babies Already Have an Accent. Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com. Accessed February 8, 2017.
Kiester Jr., Edwin. 2001. Accents Are Forever. Smithsonian Magazine. Accessed February 7, 2017.
Kuhl, Patricia K. 2010. The Linguistic Genius of Babies. TEDxRainier, Seattle. October 2010. Lecture. Accessed February 8, 2017
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