Is there such a thing as too much language learning?
10 November 2005
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Have you ever been faced with uncomfortable amounts of new or complicated information, and said something like: "I feel my head's going to explode"? Well, I don't want to blow anybody's head up, but we have been encouraging listeners and their children to learn new languages. So, in case you detect cerebral pressure building, let me offer some words of comfort about the magnificent flexibility of the human brain.
Researchers today compare the brain at birth to a kind of ready-to-assemble computer kit: it comes with working components, but they have to be connected before you have a fully functioning computer. In this view the brain comes with readiness for language in general, but acquiring the actual sounds, words, and grammar of a particular language means growing new connections between neurons, the individual brain cells. This connection-building is what happens as a toddler learns to associate the word "dog" with a four-legged animal and "milk" with what's in his drinking cup; or as another toddler learns the words "perro" for the same animal and "leche" for the same liquid.
But you may wonder: if a child is hearing both languages, will her brain mix them up and thereby hinder speech? Here's the comforting fact: the brain—especially in early childhood—has a huge, virtually inexhaustible capacity for making such connections. The more talk children are exposed to in the first three years of life, the better their language skills later. Not only that, children exposed to more than one language grow not only the connections that build vocabulary in each language, they grow connections that help them to sort out which language to use.
They learn, for example, to ask their English-speaking mother for "milk" and their Spanish-speaking grandmother for "leche".
In the past few years we've had the tragic example of people who adopted babies from orphanages in Eastern Europe and found that, as the children grew older, they were handicapped in talking to their American mothers. That wasn't a result of hearing a new language. It happened because the orphanages were thinly staffed. People watching the babies gave them minimal care and had little or no time to talk to them. They were linguistically starved, and didn't have the verbal stimulation that leads to normal use of language. Hearing talk, lots of talk, no matter how many languages are involved, is healthy activity for the human brain.
But the story gets even better. It seems there are cognitive advantages in training one's self to keep two or more languages separate. A recent study found that brain regions important for fluent speech were better developed in bilingual speakers than they were in monolinguals, especially when two languages were learned early in life.
Here's why: When a child wants to express a word in one language, the brain also activates the corresponding word in the other language. To prevent the word in the other language from being unintentionally spoken aloud, the brain has to suppress it. So, compared to the monolingual brain, the bilingual brain gets more experience in exercising this kind of control. Learning two languages at an early age is good for the brain -- and, you'll be interested to know, not just for learning to talk.
Studies at York University in Canada suggest that early bilinguals also have better cognitive control in certain types of non-verbal tasks. And that was true not just for children but also for middle-aged and older adults. Bilingualism seems to protect healthy older adults from some of the negative effects of aging on the brain. That in itself is an excellent reason to be born into a bilingual family -- or start a second language when you're still in diapers.
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Henk Haarmann of the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And in the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are and whatever you do... language makes a difference.