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Exposing your baby to foreign languages | ||
Tags: Children | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4297 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes  Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 10 26 August 2013 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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If all goes well, my wife and I will be having our first child sometime in March next
year. I'm quite excited. One of the jitters I have being a first-time father-to-be is how I can give my kid the best start possible start in life. One of the things that stuck in my mind from back in college was a short segment of a documentary I watched which featured studies that show that babies which hear foreign languages spoken during the first nine months of their lives will learn foreign languages faster later on in life. This is because during this crucial stage in their development babies learn to differentiate sounds used in speech, so if they are not exposed to the sounds of a particular foreign language, he or she will have difficulty differentiating the sounds in that language later on in life. I found this pick-up-languages-faster.html">news article which neatly summarizes this concept. I have no formal training in Linguistics. I'm hoping for any advice related to this. Which foreign languages should I expose my baby to to cover as many different foreign language sounds as possible? Also, where can I download or find samples of different foreign languages being spoken in casual conversation? edit: I can't get the hyperlink to work above so here it is: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1944528/Babies-who-he ar-foreign-speech-pick-up- languages-faster.html Edited by Duke100782 on 26 August 2013 at 1:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 5934 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 2 of 10 26 August 2013 at 6:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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This talk is controversial here, though I think the research is brilliant. The researcher makes the mind-blowing claim -- that babies need to hear the voice of a live person. They won't learn sounds from electronic recorded voices. Check it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XBIkHW954 Edited by cathrynm on 26 August 2013 at 6:04am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4342 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 3 of 10 26 August 2013 at 8:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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The link to the news article doesn't work. :(
Personally, I would be very skeptical of this. News papers generally overblow these sorts of claims, and unfortunately is is not uncommon for researchers to also put an exaggerated newsy spin on a piece of research. A general useful rule I used to live by when I was a scientist was not believe any research until it was replicated/extended in another laboratory. To generalize from this: It's probably not worth raising your child based on principles from one piece of research by one researcher, especially when the research obviously has a nice hook for the 24 hour news services to pick up on. Ask yourself one question: why would an infant (i.e. a pre-verbal being) be ready to make fine distinctions in sounds made in languages? I would find this more believable if the time period continued into the time of first language acquisition. How were the experiments run? They would have had to had a large group of infants some of which were exposed to a 2nd language before 9 months, who then didn't subsequently hear the language (either spoken or on TV/radio), who then attempted to learn the language later in life. People who had Latino wetnurses in LA in the 1980s - matched with people with Anglo wetnurses? Edited by patrickwilken on 26 August 2013 at 8:51am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4297 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 4 of 10 26 August 2013 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks a lot for the link, the research by Dr. Kuhl was precisely what I was referring too, however, the first time I came across her research I missed out on the correlation between there having to be a live person as opposed to the baby just watching TV or a voice recording. As mind-blowing as it seems, to me, having to have a human interacting with baby to activate language learning in a baby's brain sounds plausible. From an evolutionary viewpoint, it would make sense for a baby to learn to distinguish the different linguistic sounds only when it is interacting with another human, such as it's mother or doting relatives, not just when it is listening any ambient or background sounds or sounds caused by objects. I'll admit this finding is disappointing for me, I can't just turn on the television to TVE or CCTV a few hours a day and expect my baby to be able to pick up Spanish or Mandarin more easily later on. I guess the women speaking Koro to babies featured in the video already knew this by instinct. Instead of allowing my enthusiasm to be dampened, I guess this challenges me to become more creative, and it tells me that I really have to invest more time and effort on my baby if I aspire to have my kid grow up to be a polyglot or be equipped with other advantages in life. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4297 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 5 of 10 26 August 2013 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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http://www.sciencemag.org/content/255/5044/606.short
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v5/n11/abs/nrn1533.html Here are links to her publications on this topic. I'll see if I can purchase the articles to educate myself more on this topic. Edited by Duke100782 on 26 August 2013 at 3:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4718 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 6 of 10 26 August 2013 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
Don't be disappointed. Just realize that there are no magic wands when it comes to raising children. And putting on Mozart while they are sleeping won't make them smarter either. I would definitely encourage you to speak and read to your baby in as many languages as you can manage. I wish I had spent time reading kids books in Hindi to my children when they were young. It's a great principle to take what you enjoy, and share it with your children as early as possible. You get to keep doing what you like, your children receive attention from you, and the time you spend with them is more fun for both of you. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4474 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 10 27 August 2013 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
As long as there's no evidence that it's bad for them, it's a cheap gamble, right? :-) I did leave a CD of Italian songs and rhymes playing whilst my youngest was dropping off to sleep each night. I've no idea whether it helped with his Italian, but it did seem to help him drop off.
This is probably the most important part. If they see you enjoy multiple languages, maybe they will too. if not, then you've still spent quality time together. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5408 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 8 of 10 28 August 2013 at 9:56am | IP Logged | |||||
There are more studies like that:
1 person has voted this message useful |
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