Lost languages leave traces on the brain

[Basil]

Hit and run post. Too busy at the moment... but worth a read.

 

"The researchers focused on 21 Chinese children who had been adopted early in life. The average age of the children at adoption was 12.8 months, which meant that they were likely to have learned to recognize tone before being adopted. Since adoption, the children had been exposed exclusively to French, had grown up as French monolingual speakers, and had no remaining conscious knowledge of Chinese."

 

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/lost-languages-leave-traces-on-the-brain/

 

Discuss...

[Guest realmayo]

Relevant to tones, not necessarily to languages?

[geraldc]

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/20/lost-first-languages-leave-permanent-mark-on-the-brain-new-study-reveals

 

Seems to be linked to tones, the research found that Korean adoptees lost all their language

[hedwards]

@realmayo, language at higher levels doesn't generally occur until later. But, babies can and do have accents, it was something that was immediately obvious to me on the plane to China that the babies crying were Asian babies, or more to the point, ones that were being raised by people speaking Chinese. The cries had marked accents that were distinctly different from the cries of babies raised in the US. 

 

I don't have a link, but I remember seeing a study years ago about how babies would tune their cries to be the most annoying ones to the caregiver. Which seems like a reasonable proposition. The only method that a baby has of getting attention is crying, so until language ability develops, one cry needs to get attention as efficiently and effectively as possible.

[陳德聰]

Edit: Hm... going to reserve judgment.

[Guest realmayo]

hedwards:

so until language ability develops

 

So as I suggested, the findings of this study are relevant to tones but not necessarily to language?

[Tiana]

Everything that has happened in our life would influence us one way or another. So the real question is: does the fact that a person was exposed to tone in childhood make any difference? Would the person have to learn Chinese to exploit this childhood exposure? And what if we weren't fortunate enough to be exposed to Chinese in childhood? Should we never learn the language? 

[trisha2766]

That's interesting! My daughter was 2 when she was adopted.  I still think there's some Chinese in there, but unfortunately I haven't been able to use it with her as much as I had hoped.  Every so often she says something that makes me think she understands more Mandarin than she lets on sometimes.  From the time she was 2, I played Dora dvds in chinese to her a lot, and some Elmo. Hopefully that helped some.