Bilingual babies!

[judytuna]

Here's an nyt article called "Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Tell Languages Apart" ! https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/health/views/11klass.html

Spoiler: text inside, in case you've run out of your free 20 nyt articles a month

Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language
By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
Published: October 10, 2011

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer "language confusion," which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before.
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Joyce Hesselberth

Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren't many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.

But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two.

Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies' brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain.

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren't producing many words in any language.

Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

The researchers suggested that this represents a process of "neural commitment," in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.

In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older — 10 to 12 months — they were able to discriminate sounds in both.

"What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies' experience keeps them open," said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. "They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It's another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain."

The learning of language — and the effects on the brain of the language we hear — may begin even earlier than 6 months of age.

Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies perceive language and how that shapes their learning. Even in the womb, she said, babies are exposed to the rhythms and sounds of language, and newborns have been shown to prefer languages rhythmically similar to the one they've heard during fetal development.

In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different.

In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.

In a study of older infants shown silent videotapes of adults speaking, 4-month-olds could distinguish different languages visually by watching mouth and facial motions and responded with interest when the language changed. By 8 months, though, the monolingual infants were no longer responding to the difference in languages in these silent movies, while the bilingual infants continued to be engaged.

"For a baby who's growing up bilingual, it's like, 'Hey, this is important information,' " Dr. Werker said.

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain's so-called executive function.

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. "Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function," Dr. Bialystok said.

Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies "more cognitively flexible" than monolingual infants. Her research group is examining infant brains with an even newer imaging device, magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which combines an M.R.I. scan with a recording of magnetic field changes as the brain transmits information.

Dr. Kuhl describes the device as looking like a "hair dryer from Mars," and she hopes that it will help explore the question of why babies learn language from people, but not from screens.

Previous research by her group showed that exposing English-language infants in Seattle to someone speaking to them in Mandarin helped those babies preserve the ability to discriminate Chinese language sounds, but when the same "dose" of Mandarin was delivered by a television program or an audiotape, the babies learned nothing.

"This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting," Dr. Kuhl said. "They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way."
A version of this article appeared in print on October 11, 2011, on page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language.

I am vaguely aware that research into bilingual kids is a hot topic in linguistics, because it has the possibility of teaching us about our brains. So it's cool that it makes the news once in a while.

Especially interesting to me was the part at the end about Dr. Kuhl's study that showed babies learned to discriminate between sounds in another language from humans but not from from tapes or video. Of course, we only have one study on babies, so I'm not trying to say "science proves that learning from humans is better than learning from videos for our adult brains too!" because we don't know if that's true yet. But I wanted to post here because it feels like a kick in the butt to meet up with local people to practice Na'vi more regularly! My learning has come to a screeching halt.

And now, the non-sciencey part of my post: I was a bilingual baby! My parents are both immigrants to America, and I was born here; they used to speak Mandarin exclusively in the home. But when I turned 4, my mom made a conscious effort to switch to using as much English as she could, out of fear that I would be "behind" at school (probably because of articles back then claiming that bilingual kids would grow up confused). There was also a lot of fear that I'd get placed into an "english as a second language" class, which to my parents was unacceptable because I was supposed to be a perfect angel who excelled in every class so that I could get into an elite private school. Haha. Now research has shown that your kid's language is most affected by her peers when she's growing up. Anyway, I passed all the tests when I got to kindergarten and was placed in the normal class, and grew up speaking Chinglish with my parents and English with my siblings. I'm the oldest of 3 kids in my family, so as we grew up, there were more and more exclusively-English conversations at home. My youngest sibling used to be the "worst" at speaking in Chinese because by the time she was born, there were 2 other kids to speak to in English, but then she's the only one of us that took Chinese for reals in college, so now her Chinese is the "best" =). I can't read Chinese... I can speak it okay (and it sounds sort of okay... I do have a bit of an accent from underuse, but I was able to fool people in China into thinking I was just Chinese and not an American-born Chinese =\ though it might have been just how I look/dress) but I've got a pretty small vocabulary so it's hard to communicate effectively (I do a lot of circumlocution, haha). I think a lot about how it's foolish to blame my speaking habits in english (I talk too much for too long, and take too long to get to my point because I'm busy explaining every facet of what I'm trying to say) on having parents that don't really speak my language (the not-really-working hypothesis is that I'm always afraid that the person listening won't understand me/will always mishear something, so I offer too much information). Other bilingual friends of mine don't really have this problem of overexplaining everything, so it's probably more about my personality than not being able to communicate with my parents. haha.

There are some things which are in Chinese in my brain, and so even when I'm speaking in English, they come out as literal translations of the Chinese word. For example: I don't usually say "stoplight", I'll say "red-green light" (in English), because that's its literal translation from Chinese. Silly things like that.

Were you a bilingual baby? Do you have a bilingual baby? =)

[Ricardo]

Yes, I am and no I'm not.
I ever wanted to be but destiny decided otherwise.
Why did I say yes?
Because my parents taught me clear German while my grandma spoke to me in her Saxon dialect which can differ a lot.
It's a funny mix. My articulation is the clear German, the speech melody is Saxon. I noticed that because it fits perfectly when I try to speak Saxon but there may be some problems with standard German.