Wednesday, May 29, 2002
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Wednesday, May 29, 2002 |
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Fayetteville center helps babies become multilingual
Teach a one-month-old Spanish? Parlez en francais to a six-month-old? That's exactly what happens daily at Language Learning Centers in Fayetteville. Children starting at the age of 4 months are learning a variety of languages including Spanish, French and Chinese. You may think that it is a waste of time to expose infants to a second language before they can talk, but consider this. Children are born with billions of brain cells that produce trillions of connections during the first years of life. These microscopic connections are the building blocks that result in a baby's ability to talk, walk, reason and speak. During the first three years of life, a child's brain would have made a whopping 1,000 trillion connections. The creation of a complex network of connections, referred to as "wiring," continues at a feverish pace during the first 10 years of life. What wires and rewires the brain, say neuroscientists, are repeated experiences. Neuroscientists have found that every experience a child has excites certain neural circuits. The circuits that are consistently excited or "turned on" are the ones that are strengthened, while those connections that are rarely used are eliminated. The longer a child is exposed to one type of experience, the stronger the connection and the more likely the learning that takes place is permanently etched in the brain. So the young brain must use these connections or lose them. The process of eliminating unused connections, called pruning, creates "windows of opportunities" for learning specific skills. Researchers now know that the "window of opportunity" for learning a second language is highest between birth and the age of six. After this time, the "window of opportunity" undergoes a steady decline and closes around the age of 10. One critical period for learning a new language is between birth and 12 months. Researchers have found that at three months, an infant's brain can distinguish several hundred different spoken sounds. By 12 months of age, an infant's brain can only recognize those sounds that are part of the language that is consistently spoken. For example, Japanese babies can distinguish between "r" and "l" sounds at around six months of age, but they lose the ability to distinguish between the sounds by 12 months old. By this time, their brains have organized to ignore the sounds that are not used in the Japanese language. This means that infants can be exposed to a variety of different languages and their brains will make the necessary connections to be able to speak each of these languages. By the end of adolescence, the brain has decreased in plasticity (the brain's ability to change or adapt in response to experience) but has increased in power. Talents and latent tendencies, such as early language exposure begin to blossom. At Language Learning Centers, they take seriously teaching children different languages during the critical periods of development. "Our programs are focused on taking advantage of the windows of opportunity that exist in children," said director Miyoshi Bourget. "By offering a variety of programs for infants to adolescents, including a half-day immersion program for preschoolers, we can take advantage of the child's natural ability to learn languages effortlessly and teach them to speak other languages. From our bright, visually stimulating classrooms to our engaging instructors, we make learning languages fun." The leaders of Language Learning Centers believe that second languages should be taught long before a child enters middle or high school, and to develop children's minds to excel in language and other areas, parents should start by providing them with the brain-building experiences today.
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