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Bilingual Babies More Perceptive To Nonnative Tongues

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Bilingual Babies More Perceptive To Nonnative Tongues

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Type: Podcast
citation:
Werker, J. (2011, February 25). Bilingual Babies More Perceptive To Nonnative Tongues. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134059279/being-bilingual-not-only-a-boon-for-native-tongues
Assessment:
This podcast is helpful to add to the researches of bilingual children and the stronger abilities to distinguish between languages even if they have never exposed to this language. Also, I don't think this podcast is biased because it mentions several languages. I used this podcast as supportive research for the abilities of bilingual children.
Reflection:
I am a listener person. So, this source was the most interesting for me. I tried to find other podcasts that address information about bilingual infants, but I did not find any. However, I learned from this podcast that raising a bilingual child to exceed its benefit to reach other languages, not just the ones the child knows. When I read this article, I wanted to read about infants who are exposed to more than two languages. I thought about doing another research on children with more than two languages. Finally, I used the information in this article to support my paper and talk about the abilities of bilingual infants.

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Education | News releases | Social science

For years, scientists and parents alike have touted the benefits of introducing babies to two languages: Bilingual experience has been shown to improve cognitive abilities, especially problem-solving.

And for infants raised in households where two languages are spoken, that bilingual learning happens almost effortlessly. But how can babies in monolingual households develop such skills?

"As researchers studying early language development, we often hear from parents who are eager to provide their child with an opportunity to learn another language, but can't afford a nanny from a foreign country and don't speak a foreign language themselves," said Naja Ferjan Ramirez, a research scientist at the University of Washington Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences ( I-LABS).

A new study by I-LABS researchers, published July 17 in Mind, Brain, and Education, is among the first to investigate how babies can learn a second language outside of the home. The researchers sought to answer a fundamental question: Can babies be taught a second language if they don't get foreign language exposure at home, and if so, what kind of foreign language exposure, and how much, is needed to spark that learning?

The researchers took their query all the way to Europe, developing a play-based, intensive, English-language method and curriculum and implementing it in four public infant-education centers in Madrid, Spain. Sixteen UW undergraduates and recent graduates served as tutors for the study, undergoing two weeks of training at I-LABS to learn the teaching method and curriculum before traveling to Spain. The country's extensive public education system enabled the researchers to enroll 280 infants and children from families of varying income levels.

Based on years of I-LABS research on infant brain and language development, the method emphasizes social interaction, play, and high quality and quantity of language from the teachers. The approach uses "infant-directed speech" - often called "parentese" - the speech style parents use to talk to their babies, which has simpler grammar, higher and exaggerated pitch, and drawn-out vowels.

"Our research shows that parentese helps babies learn language," Ferjan Ramirez said.

Babies aged 7 to 33.5 months were given one hour of English sessions a day for 18 weeks, while a control group received the Madrid schools' standard bilingual program. Both groups of children were tested in Spanish and English at the start and end of the 18 weeks. The children also wore special vests outfitted with lightweight recorders that recorded their English learning. The recordings were analyzed to determine how many English words and phrases each child spoke.

The children who received the UW method showed rapid increases in English comprehension and production, and significantly outperformed the control group peers at all ages on all tests of English. By the end of the 18-week program, the children in the UW program produced an average of 74 English words or phrases per child, per hour; children in the control group produced 13 English words or phrases per child, per hour.

Ferjan Ramirez said the findings show that even babies from monolingual homes can develop bilingual abilities at this early age.

"With the right science-based approach that combines the features known to grow children's language, it is possible to give very young children the opportunity to start learning a second language, with only one hour of play per day in an early education setting," she said. "This has big implications for how we think about foreign-language learning."

Follow-up testing 18 weeks later showed the children had retained what they learned. The English gains were similar between children attending the two schools serving predominantly low-income neighborhoods and the two serving mid-income areas, suggesting that wealth was not a significant factor in the infants' ability to learn a foreign language. Children's native language (Spanish) continued to grow as they were learning English, and was not negatively affected by introducing a second language.

"Science indicates that babies' brains are the best learning machines ever created, and that infants' learning is time-sensitive. Their brains will never be better at learning a second language than they are between 0 and 3 years of age," said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS and a UW professor of speech and hearing sciences.

The results, Kuhl said, have the potential to transform how early language instruction is approached in the United States and worldwide:

"Parents in Madrid, in the United States and around the world are eager to provide their children with an opportunity to learn a foreign language early. The U.S. census shows that 27 percent of America's children under the age of 6 are now learning a language other than English at home. While these children are fully capable of learning both their parents' language and English, they often do not have adequate exposure to English prior to kindergarten entry and as a result, often lag behind their peers once they enter school," she said.

"I-LABS' new work shows we can create an early bilingual learning environment for dual-language learners in an educational setting, and in one hour per day, infants can ignite the learning of a second language earlier and much easier than we previously thought. This is doable for everybody," Kuhl said.

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For more information, contact Ferjan Ramirez at naja@uw.edu or 206-747-7850 and Kuhl at pkkuhl@uw.edu or 206-685-1921.

The study was supported by the Madrid Regional Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, and the UW I-LABS Ready Mind Project.

Tag(s): Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences * I-LABS * Naja Ferjan Ramirez * Patricia Kuhl

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Bilingual babies: Study shows how exposure to a foreign language ignites infants' learning

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Education | News releases | Social science For years, scientists and parents alike have touted the benefits of introducing babies to two languages: Bilingual experience has been shown to improve cognitive abilities, especially problem-solving. And for infants raised in households where two languages are spoken, that bilingual learning happens almost effortlessly.

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citation:
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington: National Academy of sciences.

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Type: TED Talk
Citation:
Kuhl, P. (2010, October). The linguistic genius of babies. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies
Assessment:
TED talks are mostly entertaining. This talk is helpful because it gives more details on infants' abilities to listen to pitches and sounds, and it also adds to the studies and researches of the abilities of bilingual infants. Also, the source talks about a machine that records mind's responses of children who are bilingual when they listen to a new language. This source is a rich source. It gives three different studies on children's responses to two languages. This source show videos of children exposing to different languages and their reaction. Since this is a video, I can say that it was just for white and Asian children, on other colored represented in the study.
Reflection:
The study on children's abilities to notice the differences in the sounds of the languages when they are four months old is surprising. Also, when the speaker said that people start to build boundaries when they are one year old, I was shocked. I learned much information from this source. I used it as a foundation to organize my inquiry because it has most of the details of the other research about the boundaries, expectations, and the age of flexibility in young children. Finally, I used this source as a reference in my final paper several times.

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Type: Peer reviewed journal article (1)
Citation:
Estes, K. G., & Hay, J. F. (2015). Flexibility in Bilingual Infants Word Learning. Child Development,86(5), 1371-1385. doi:10.1111/cdev.12392
Assessment:
It is a useful source because people can know from it that children who grow bilingual stay open to new sounds until later than monolingual children. Besides, this source is not biased because it is just a regular research paper, so it states the findings with no apparent human biases.  Additionally, this source is helpful to know more differences between bilingual and monolingual children. It adds considerable information about the differences between bilingual and monolingual children.
Reflection:
I learned from this article the different levels of flexibility between bilingual and monolingual children, and it made me think about the benefits of being bilingual more profound than just knowing the two languages and being able to communicate wider. This article was the first one I read, and I realized that it is connected to every article in my inquiry. All the research that I have in my inquiry stresses that bilingual infants have more flexibility and openness to other languages, words, sounds, and pitches. I can use this source as supportive research for the abilities and benefits of growing a bilingual infant.

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Type: a source of my choice.
Citation:
Temina-Kingsolver, V. (n.d.). Concept Development in Bilinguals: Vygotskian Framework. Retrieved April 24, 2018, from https://languageavenue.com/linguistics/psycholinguistics/language-and-thought/item/concept-development-in-bilinguals-vygotskian-framework
Poem Summary:
Vygotsky’s work took place in 20s and 30s, Vygotsky wrote a book discusses thoughts and speeches.

Schoo ls develop different conceptions and cognitions. This development called language acquisition.

Inside the mind, the development happen. The education make it come in.

To Mental development, educational moments, spontaneous concepts, strong instructor is the taker.

Program help language jump.

Programs support the language in ways, scientific language and every days.

Children need activities that match their communities.

In Vygotsky's days scientific language was the way, but today bilingual focus is the way.

Social intrusions is ZPD, zone of development means the D.

Cannot learn the language but acquire it, Scaffolding help them master  it.

Activates form higher thinking rooms.

Environment as well, motivate, stimulate , and demand working roles.

All these tips help mature, to highest potential take the fore.
Assessment:
This source is a good source to use because it shows the relationship between Vygotsky's theory and being bilingual.  However, I think this source could have done more detailed connections and examples between Vygotsky and bilingual education. The website gives examples of the school or educational language and the daily language of students. It says that teachers should build on the past knowledge of children, but it did not give enough examples for building on bilingual children’s previous experience. Additionally, this article is not biased because it talks about the educational language and not a specific language or biased inputs. Also, this article is to connect the theoretical background to bilingual infants, which is the research I am working on, to a theoretical background. I did not meet this need, unfortunately. But, I used this source along with other sources to have a theory to build on.
Reflection:
I learned from this article that even the educational language needs to be determined like the math and science languages. I also learned that most learning processes are similar. This article changed how I think about the difficulties of learning a new language. It made me feel that if everyone thought about learning languages like any learning process, they will build on their past knowledge and take it easy. I remember the grammar teacher in the English institution in Illinois was asking us to translate the grammar to our languages to learn it faster. Her method worked for everyone. Nevertheless, this article made me think about finding other sources for a theoretical background for bilingual children, so I did. I used Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington: National Academy of sciences. Bransford helped me to build on Vygotsky's ideas more and add to it Jean Piaget cognitive development theory.  They both form the part of the historical background of my paper.

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Written by: Valentina Temina-Kingsolver

Country: Russian Federation

Times read: 6810

Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky worked in the 1920s and 1930s, and devoted a large portion of his book Thought and Speech (Vygotsky, 1986) to the experimental work carried out by him and his colleagues, its purpose being to investigate the development of concepts in school-age children.

This issue is of great importance and interest for those who are concerned with cognitive and psychological development of bilingual students, including administrators, teachers, and parents. Understanding of the processes of concept development as they are related to school-age bilingual speakers may also shed some light on general issues of L1 and L2 acquisition.

Role of Instruction

Vygotsky's drew an analogy between the processes of acquiring first and second languages and acquiring everyday and scientific concepts. He also wondered about the relationships between school instruction and knowledge acquisition, and the processes of internal development of scientific concepts in the minds of schoolchildren, "The child's thought is non-deliberate and unconscious of itself. How, then, does the child eventually reach awareness and mastery of his own thoughts?" (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 163)

Vygotsky continuously emphasized the important role of education/instruction for maturity of children's thought processes in general and the development of their conceptual system in particular. He considered instruction at school age to be the decisive moment which determines the entire fate of the mental development of a child, including the development of his concepts. Vygotsky saw the problem of non-spontaneous concepts, including scientific, as the problem of instruction and development.

At the same time, he emphasized the nonidentity of development and instruction. Instruction serves as the source of development. It is not possible for some mental functions to arise without instruction:

The school years as a whole are the optimal period for instruction in operations that require awareness and deliberate control; instruction in these operations maximally furthers the development of the higher psychological functions while they are maturing. This applies also to the development of the scientific concepts to which school instruction introduces the child. (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 190)

Vygotsky stressed the importance of creating and implementing corresponding programs in educational processes that would have their purpose to assist the development of scientific concepts: "Analysis of the data showed that as long as the curriculum supplies the necessary material, the development of scientific concepts runs ahead of the development of spontaneous concepts ..." (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 190)

Through instructional activities, a teacher can find ways to connect students' everyday knowledge with academic knowledge of schools and thus bring both their spontaneous and scientific concept development to a more advanced point. This issue is particularly critical for bilingual students. Hedegaard (1998) asserts that, "the relation between subject-matter concepts and personal concepts is often much weaker for immigrants and refugees coming to a new country than for children with generations of ancestors in a society" (p. 114). She conducted a study with Puerto Rican children in New York City and noticed that subject-matter knowledge was based on students' everyday knowledge and activities, and at the same time the everyday knowledge was influenced by the development of scientific concepts in the way that it was brought to more complex levels.

John-Steiner et al. (1998) examined the systematicity of concept formation and used a functional systems approach to analyze the connection between scientific and everyday concepts. According to these scholars, "this approach accounts for the varying conditions under which humans acquire systematic concepts and the ways they relate them to both their everyday experiences and the sociocultural practices of their communities" (p. 128).

Vygotsky argued that the question of the development of scientific concepts in school-age children is the most important practical question that schools face in regard to educating a child in the system of scientific knowledge. This question is an important one for modern schools too, with the advent of NCLB testing. We need to ask ourselves: Does test-oriented instruction help students to develop cognitively and psychologically? Another important question is: What difference does it make for ESL students if they are taught content areas in English, a language they do not fully understand?

Role of Social Interaction

Vygotsky saw great value in cooperative learning and social interaction. One of the central elements in the educational process, according to Vygotsky, belongs to the cooperation of a child and an adult during which the knowledge is transferred to the child by way of the intentional development of scientific concepts. The zone of proximal development of the child in regard to his spontaneous concepts plays an important role here as it paves the way for the development of scientific concepts in the child's mind.

He considered the most significant difference between the tasks with everyday concepts and the tasks with scientific concepts is that a child has to solve scientific tasks with the help of a teacher. The difference here, Vygotsky claims, is that in cooperation with a knowledgeable other, a child can do more than he can do independently.

Under conditions of educational process, with the systematic cooperation of a teacher, the maturation of a child's higher psychological functions occurs, including the development of scientific concepts.

Spontaneous concepts do not have awareness and deliberateness. Only with the help of a 'knowledgeable other' can they be raised to the level of awareness and deliberateness:

Spontaneous concepts that confront a deficit of conscious and volitional control find this control in the zone of proximal development, in the cooperation of the child with adults. That is why it is essential first to bring spontaneous concepts up to a certain level of development that would guarantee that the scientific concepts are actually just above the spontaneous ones. (Vygotsky, 1986, pp. 194-195)

Vygotsky continuously pointed out that the process of concept development is a complex one. According to Vygotsky, "scientific concepts are not acquired, learned, or grasped by memory, rather they emerge and form with the help of a great effort through the activity of a child's own thought" (Vygotsky, 2005, p. 188). He called it "a true act of thinking that cannot be learned by simple memorization" (Vygotsky, 2005, p. 178). In order for a concept to develop, the whole thinking of a child in its internal maturity should be raised to a high level so that a concept should evolve. The task of a teacher is to organize this activity of the child and to form the actions that the child needs for mastering the subject-matter knowledge:

Because the teacher, working with the pupil, has explained, supplied information, questioned, corrected, and made the pupil explain, the child's concepts have been formed in the process of instruction, in collaboration with an adult. In finishing the sentence, he makes use of the fruits of that collaboration, this time independently. The adult's help, invisibly present, enables the child to solve such problems earlier than everyday problems. (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 191)

Echevarria and McDonough (1995) studied the use of instructional conversations (IC) with bilingual special education students. Through the development of themes, the teacher provided a cognitive link between the story and the prior knowledge of the bilingual students, which helped them understand important concepts. As a result, students often used the concepts in their narratives.

Social interaction and development of language are also essential for the child's development of social knowledge and Theory of Mind (Garfield et al., 2001, p. 518).

Role of Environment

Vygotsky saw the important role that the environment plays in concept development in that the environment should create motivation for the concepts to be developed. In regard to this, Vygotsky referred to Akh, who considered deterministic function to be crucial for the development of concepts. The environment should stimulate the development of mind/intellect by way of setting new goals and making new demands. Only then can thought processes in children develop to their full potential and reach the highest forms of maturity.

Adolescent Age

Vygotsky noted that adolescent age was very important for concept formation. This is the time when a person's thinking matures.

One of the characteristic moments for concept development in adolescents, according to Vygotsky, is the adolescent's use of a concept in a direct/clear situation. Vygotsky pointed out that if an adolescent uses a concept in a concrete situation, he uses it most easily and unmistakably, and how difficult it is for an adolescent to transfer the same concept to different things. When the concept is still connected to the concrete, direct situation, it directs the child's thinking most easily and unmistakably. When a direct concrete situation changes, it makes it more difficult to use the concept developed in a different situation, but still an adolescent manages to do this at the first stage of maturation of his thinking.

Vygotsky claims that it is much more difficult to define the concept when the concept is used outside the concrete situation in which it was developed, and start expanding it in a totally abstract plane. However, the biggest difficulty that an adolescent has to overcome is the further transfer of the meaning of the newly formed concept to the other concrete situation. "The path from abstract to concrete is no less difficult than once was the path from concrete to abstract." (Vygotsky, 2005, p. 168)

We can conclude that such imperative factors as instruction, social interaction, environment and age have to be considered in order to contribute to the process of concept acquisition by school-age children, including bilinguals.

References:

Echevarria, J., & McDonough, R. (1995). An alternative reading approach: Instructional conversations in a bilingual special education setting. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 10, 108-1 19.

Garfield, J. L., Peterson, C. C., & Perry, T. (2001, November). Social Cognition, Language Acquisition and the Development of the Theory of Mind. Mind and Language, 16(5), 494-541.

Hedegaard, M. (1998). Situated Learning and Cognition: Theoretical Learning and Cognition. Mind Culture and Activity, 5(2), 114-126.

John-Steiner, V., Meehan, T.M., & Mahn, H. (1998). A functional systems approach to cognitive development. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 5(2), 127-134.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language (A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (2005). Myshlenie y Rech [Thought and Speech]. Moscow: Labyrinth.

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Concept Development in Bilinguals: Vygotskian Framework

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Written by: Valentina Temina-Kingsolver Country: Russian Federation Times read: 6810 Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky worked in the 1920s and 1930s, and devoted a large portion of his book Thought and Speech (Vygotsky, 1986) to the experimental work carried out by him and his colleagues, its purpose being to investigate the development of concepts in school-age children.

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Bilingual and monolingual baby brains differ in response to language

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Bilingualism Modulates Infants' Selective Attention to the Mouth of a Talking Face

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Bilingualism Modulates Infants' Selective Attention to the Mouth of a Talking Face

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Type: Peer reviewed journal article (3)
citation:
Pons, F., Bosch, L., & Lewkowicz, D. J. (2015). Bilingualism Modulates Infants’ Selective Attention to the Mouth of a Talking Face. Psychological Science, 26(4), 490-498. doi:10.1177/0956797614568320
Assessment:
This source is helpful as the other research on bilingual infants. It gives information that bilingual infants usually focus on the mouth and eyes to see how the words are pronounced. This article does not show biases because it is a research paper which follows the research rules and gives results. This article was one of the articles that support the position of being bilingual, and I used it as one of the informative articles about bilingual babies in my paper.
Reflection:
I learned from the article that children's focus matters, so parents should observe their children's reactions before they even start to talk or give physical reactions to the words and commands. Positive or negative influences of parents actions can be observed earlier than we think. This article was also one of the research on the differences between bilingual and monolingual children, and I used it as one of the articles in the second part of my paper.

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Bilingualism affects 9-month-old infants expectations about how words refer to kinds

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Bilingualism affects 9-month-old infants expectations about how words refer to kinds

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Type: Peer reviewed journal article (2)
Citation:
Byers-Heinlein, K. (2016). Bilingualism affects 9-month-old infants’ expectations about how words refer to kinds. Developmental Science, 20(1). doi:10.1111/desc.12486
Assessment:
This article is excellent research that provides more information about bilingual infants. This source is helpful because it widens the reader thinking about the abilities and expectations of bilingual. The study does not represent biases because it is a research paper on infants and it took several children, did the experiment, and gives findings. This paper worked very well for my research because I wanted to gather as many studies on the differences between bilingual and monolingual children as I could. This source worked correctly for my study because it is one of the papers that I used in the final paper.
Reflection:
This article made me think deeply about people's expectations in general and how might the expectations limit the learning abilities. The shocking part was how early we build these expectations, and how do they show signs of languages' boundaries. Additionally, this source is connected to the others in my inquiry such as the TED talk Kuhl, P. (2010, October). The linguistic genius of babies. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies. The speaker says that children start to show signs of being bound listeners as early as eight months old. Children in this study were nine and ten months old and already show their expectations of one word one object.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me_v82q0ins

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Type: A professional book.
Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2003). The multilingual mind: Issues discussed by, for, and about people living with many languages. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Assessment:
This book is an easy read. Even though it is a professional book, it is built on real stories. The chapter I read describes the bilingual situations by stories, which make the book accessible and exciting. The section I read gives examples of Spanish speakers, but I do not think because it is biased. I think it is the cases that the author faced and build on it her experiences on bilingualism. In fact, most non-native speakers in the US are Spanish speakers because of the immigration, so it is not kind of bias. Nevertheless, this book gives significant information about the best ways and age to raise a bilingual child. Also, the book provides information about different age groups and multilingualism.
Reflection:
Everyone likes stories, and I love this book because the information comes as reflections on the stories. I learned from this book the ways and methods to raise a bilingual child. Other articles show the advantages of building a bilingual child, but they do not give means. This book was my starting point, and I felt I can start writing about this took with confidant because I have enough details about bilingual infants. However, this book made me think about many friends of me who speak Arabic, live in Saudi, and speak little English, and they use English with their kids sometimes because they want to raise a bilingual child. This method is wrong according to the book. Children need equal exposure to both languages and a fluent speaker of the language. I am thinking now how much a mother, who tries to use words she does not master, limits her child's language development.