My Science School

Is there a “right age” to learn a new language? When are we most receptive to learning a language? How do children learn languages? What are the benefits of picking up a foreign language? Let's find out...

How do children learn language?

One researcher called Noam Chomsky believed that the ability to team language is innate. Every child instinctively knows how to combine nouns and verbs to form the structure of sentences, and he will learn to do so regardless of whether he is taught to do so. The researcher had observed that children all over the world, no matter what language they speak, acquire language at around the same ages-they will learn their first words at the same time, speak bwo-word phrases at the same time and start speaking in sentences at the same age

Another researcher B. F. Skinner disagreed. He believed that children learn language through experience and rewards and punishment. For instance, if there is a dog in the room and the child says 'dog, his mother will reward him with a smile. The child thus learns that dog is the correct term for the creature and will use it the next time. Similarly, teachers and parents will criticise incorrect grammatical constructions and reward correct ones, and that is how the child learns to speak correctly.

Is there a right age to learn a language? One can learn to speak a language at any time. However, there seems to be a 'critical period for language development-about age 5, when we are most receptive to learning a language. It is easier to pick up a language at this age.

Learning foreign languages

Research has demonstrated many benefits of learning a foreign language. Apart from the obvious benefits of learning about a new culture and being able to communicate better with people from different countries, it also helps to develop several mental skills. When you learn a new language, you tend to pay more attention to grammar rules and sentence construction, and through this, you get a better understanding of the structure of language. Ultimately, this helps you to use your original language more effectively. Learning French will thus make you a better English speaker as well. Individuals who speak more than one language have been found to have better attention spans. They may be better at multi-tasking and decision making.

Learning a language can also boost our memory. Some researchers have found that learning a new language helps to enhance the development of certain areas of the brain-you actually build grey matter, just as exercising helps to build muscles! Bilinguals, i.e., people who can speak two languages, have been found to develop Alzheimer's disease (a disorder in old age where people lose their memory) at a much later age than those who speak just one language.

Quick tips

We can use psychological principles to help us leam a foreign language. Here are some tips.

• Language is best learnt in the natural surroundings where it is spoken, rather than in a classroom. Hence, speaking to others who speak the language and leaming conversational phrases, is more effective than mere rote repetition of words and grammatical structures.
• Exposure is key-it is useful to immerse yourself in the language, rather than devote one hour per day to studying the language. The reason why people who go to a foreign country learn to speak the language quickly is that they are surrounded by it. Watching movies, listening to songs, reading books and talking to people in the language will be of great help. You can also keep little vocabulary chits around your house write a cand saying the French word for mirror and place it next to the mirror, the word for ‘toothbnish' near the toothbrush, etc.
• Working on all aspects of the language speaking, listening, reading and writing is helpful to understand how a word is written and pronounced.
•  Practise-One of the best ways to learn a language is to keep speaking it, rather than passively listening. Do not worry about making mistakes. Talking to native speakers of that language, forming a study group where all of you converse in that language completely, is very effective. Online groups are also available.
• Have fun with it-Having fun with learning helps to keep you motivated. Singing songs, playing word games, enacting plays in the language, etc. will help you learn it better.

Picture Credit : Google 

If you ever listen deeply to a song on your headphones and focus intensely, you might sometimes see colours emerging in your mind that align with the songs mood or pace.

The science of perception

 Perception is highly variable. As human beings, our range of perception evolved to exclude the nanoscale and macroscale, and we learned to perceive only "medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds". We, as evolutionary organisms, have developed brains that understand only what we need in order to function in the world. And that means our tools of sensory perception are cultivated and specialised according to our domain of operation. We're perception specialists. And specialists can only ever handle a narrow dimension. But here's the good news dimension. But here's the good news: this doesn't have to limit our ability to put our extinction tools of preception to much better use and produce a much more lucid mental model of our reality.

Synaesthesia is the ability of brains to create collaboration between our memories and the sensory regions; here, sights, sounds, colours, tastes, shapes all interact to produce cross-integrated modes of perception - you can hear in colour, taste sights, see sounds, and all that jazz, as per Sussex-University research.

The combinatorial strategy

A well-documented tool of information-processing and storage is Mnemonics a mental tool that help us remember things more easily. Mnemonics employ a similar mechanism to synaesthesia. It works on the same principle of interconnecting concepts and associating new objects with pre-existing memories.

Any higher level of perception and information-processing seems to require a combinatorial strategy. Given that our perception is limited by the bandwidth of our senses, it becomes all the more useful - if not imperative - that we make efforts to increase interaction between the brain's domains and sensory inputs to produce a more cohesive and comprehensive view of the world.

Disinhibited feedback theory

 Neurobiologist J. Neufeld believes that the brains of synaesthetes are not much different from that of your everyday friend. But synaesthetic sensations can occur when the barriers between our sensory-processing regions of our brain recede or fall away. In this state of disinhibition, cognitive signals flow more freely between and along our sensory hierarchies and neural pathways. Thus, an optical stimulus (an object or word we see or read) might trigger or bleed into the olfactory (smell-sensing) cortex, producing a sensation of fragrance or odour associated with the word or object.

How does it work?

Synaesthesia is about the interaction between domains of your brain that hitherto worked in isolation. It's collaborative, integrative, interactive. It seems to fortify or strengthen a perception by combining more layers of sensory input in its formation. Like an artist fully recreates a face by accreting dabs of paint of varied shades to define each contour. Like a lump of sugar dissolves fully into a cup of tea to make it sweet. Like you find a joke hilarious because you've processed the punchline simultaneously in two different dimensions of perception the literal, and the ticklish nonsensical - and, therefore, the double-entendre shocks you into laughter.

Picture Credit : Google