Research Links Early Exposure to Language in Babies to Easier Acquisition of the Language as Adults

Tue Dec 8 14:43:55 2009 Pacific Time

NORTHRIDGE, Calif., Dec. 8 (AScribe Newswire) -- Most scientists agree that the earlier you expose a child to a language, the easier it is for that child to learn it.

California State University, Northridge assistant professor of psychology Janet S. Oh wanted to take that concept a step further. She wondered whether early experience with a language - say before the age of one - can still help an adult many years later to acquire that language more easily that an individual who has not had such early exposure.

"Early indications are that it does," said Oh, who published the results of her pilot study in the latest issue of the Journal of Child Language.

Oh's pilot study compared 12 adults adopted from Korea by U.S. families as young children to 13 participants who had no prior exposure to Korean. All but one of the 12 adopted Koreans were brought to the U.S. prior to age one. Because their adoptive families were European Americans, the adopted Korean adults had little to no exposure to Korean after adoption. Oh wanted to find out whether relearning can aid in accessing early childhood language memory.

All 25 participants in the study were recruited and tested during the second week of the first semester of college Korean language classes. They completed a language background questionnaire and interview, a childhood slang task and a Korean phoneme identification task. Phonemes are the smallest contrastive units in the sound system of a language.

"The results revealed an advantage for adopted participants in identifying some Korean phonemes, suggesting that some components of early childhood language memory can remain intact despite many years of disuse, and that relearning a language can help in accessing such a memory," Oh said.

Oh had a suspicion that the adopted adults might have had some advantage in learning Korean as adults, but she didn't expect the results she got.

"The average age of adoption was five months, so we really weren't sure what the study would find," she said. "They were infants when they came to the United States so they weren't even speaking yet, and all exposure to Korean language and culture was pretty much cut off. Yet, when they started studying Korean as adults they clearly mastered learning the sounds that make up the language much easier than those who never had exposure to the language."

Oh said she chose Korean in part because the sounds that make up the language are so different from English. The distinctions between the speech sounds initially can be quite difficult for non-native speakers to hear, much less produce.

[This is yet another piece of scientific evidence to confirm Le Beaumont's Gifted Babies Program. The first piece of evidence we have was that a 65 year old student of ours were able to recognize the basic sounds of Putonghua he was exposed to as a baby. The 2nd piece of evidence was that a 29 year old student of ours was not longer able to recognize the basic sounds of Putonghua without any exposure as a baby. If you want your child to learn English and Putonghua well, start as early as possible, as a baby. The same principle applies to other key languages in the world. Le Beaumont Language Centre is leading the world in the R & D of early brain development and language acquisition. Come to the Saturday Parenting Seminar to share 10,000 hours of research for free. It may change the whole future of your child.]