So let’s talk about aging. It happens to all of us, and as we get older, the ways that
we deal with all sorts of activities change. Language is definitely no exception – the way
that we pick up new languages as adults is really different from how we pick up our native tongues
as little babies. But what about learning a new language once you’ve already got one,
but while you’re still little? It may be easier to pick up something new as a kid,
but it’s still no walk in the park. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
So we’ve talked a number of times before about how amazing babies are at picking up
their first languages. They’re total pros - even if you throw two different
languages at them at the same time, they have no trouble sorting all of that data
into two different bins to build two different systems.
Other than a few biological processes of varying degrees of grossness, there’s
nothing babies do better than language.
You might expect that this would mean that little kids moving somewhere new
would be much better at picking up a new language than grownups. And this is true, but as we’ll
see, even being a baby is no guarantee of complete success when you're picking up a new language.
So you might remember our episode about L2 transfer, where we talked about how what you
have from your first language really carries over when you’re learning your second.
But that was about adults. What happens if you pick up an L2
as a kid? Does it work the same way, or do child and
adult L2 learners just take different paths through the black-shrouded forest of transfer? There’s
been a lot of studies on this, but let’s look at an example from Dutch. In Dutch,
word order is a lot freer than it is in English. So for example, if
you want to say that Hildibrand threw the ball twice, you can say this.
“Hildibrand heeft twee keer [de bal] gegooid”.
Or you can say “Hildibrand heeft [de bal] twee keer gegooid”. Both are fine!
This is called scrambling, but it doesn’t mean that you can just move words around wherever you like willy-nilly.
Sometimes scrambling really changes the meaning of a sentence. And for Dutch, the best way
to see this is by putting in negation. If you want to say that Hildibrand didn’t
throw the ball, then you need to scramble, like in “Hildibrand heeft [de bal] niet gegooid.”
Leaving it in place, as in “Hildibrand heeft niet de bal gegooid”, is only okay
if you’re trying to imply that Hildibrand threw something else. Like a frisbee, or a spear.
Okay, so now the question becomes, if you’re learning Dutch, how much of a grasp do you
have on when it’s okay to scramble your sentences interchangeably and when it’s not?
Well, a study looked at exactly this, comparing native speakers, who had been learning the language
from birth, with two different groups of English speakers picking up Dutch as an L2: adults and kids.
The researchers acted out a story with puppets, and then asked participants to agree or disagree
with an explanation of what happened, and then explain it themselves.
We want to be sure that if people are making mistakes, it’s not because they’re trying
to do something different with their language. This kind of task makes all participants create
sentences from the same situations, to try to get the same structures from them without biasing them!
So what happened? Well of course, the native speakers were doing the scrambling that they were supposed
to. And our L2 speakers? Well, a lot of the adults and some of the kids were scrambling just like the native speakers,
and denying that Hildibrand was throwing anything.
But others didn’t scramble properly, and made sentences where the word order was just
wrong for Dutch. So like, putting the noun at the end of the sentence, after the verb.
You wouldn’t do that in Dutch… but you would do that in English, and so it’s pretty
clear that kids along with adults have transfered over their English grammar, and
just haven’t Dutch-ed it up yet. But maybe these kids were making the same kinds of mistakes
as the adults because they got into learning the language too late. Is there a best-before
date for your brain when it comes to L2s?
Comparing how old people were when they moved to thieir new country to how good they can get
at their new language can help answer that question. A study looked at 240 native speakers
of Korean who moved to the United States at anywhere between 1 to 23 years old.
And at least for the syntax, when it came to judging questions of whether sentences of English were right or wrong?
People who started learning English as adults made some mistakes in deciding in whether
you could swap “go” for “goes” in a sentence like “Every Friday I go exploring with my
friends ”. Or that you can ask “Where did she put the hammer?” and not “Why
did she put the hammer?”. But if you started learning English when you
were a baby or a preschooler? No problem. The study didn’t really find any differences
in the syntax between native speakers who were born in the US and kids who immigrated at up to seven years old.
There’s a lot of research that shows that the earlier you get exposed to your L2,
the more stuff you’ll be able to recover. And if you want to know more about that,
we'll have some more on the extra materials on our website! Now, it’s possible
that there’s just something special about syntax. The rules that structure language are complex;
you really need to have acquired the syntax in your L1, before you can transfer it to your L2.
And syntax takes a long time to learn! But there are things that you acquire waaaay earlier,
like your sounds. Do really little kids show L1 transfer in their phonology, since they
acquire it sooner? It turns out that it’s relatively easy
to test how even tiny babies deal with language sounds, so some of the most interesting research
about early L2 acquisition has to do with phonology.
For example, one experiment studied 6-month-old Swedish and American babies, and looked at
how they categorize sounds. The sound /i/ is a phoneme in English, which
means that it creates a contrast in meaning - so like, bee is a different thing than boo.
But English doesn’t care about /y/, unlike Swedish, which cares about both /i/ and /y/.
You can tell because in Swedish /bit/ and /byt/ mean two different things, piece and
change.
So experimenters played both sets of babies recorded syllables with either /i/ or /y/. And sometimes
the syllables had a prototypical vowel sound - like a really ideal fi or fy - but sometimes
they were a little off the mark, like (fi). Then, the researchers checked to see what
sounds the babies were interested in using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. So they’d
turn their heads in the direction of something cool, and then they would look away whan that something cool
got boring.
And it turned out that babies were way more interested in the prototypical sounds of their
language than anything else! Swedish babies cared a lot about both fi and
fy, but not about the inbetweeny stuff. The English babies only liked fi, and you
couldn’t get them interested even in the most beautiful, prototypical fy sound. That’s
for tiny Swedes! That’s not for me. Ignore.
This is actually pretty useful, right? It means by the time that they're six months old, kids are already
starting to craft the phonetic categories that are relevant for their language. 6 months!
That’s really early. And when they hear something that's less than ideal, it doesn’t
matter! They just assume it’s part of the random variation that's coming at them all
of the time, and then go about their bodily functions unfazed.
We see something similar in the Korean study that we mentioned earlier:
The researchers found really significant links between how old you are when you immigrate,
and how native-like your English sounds. Your phonology has a super strong influence on your
accent, and people who moved to the US even as little as babies still had more of a non-native
accent than those born there!
So just like the Swedish study, the sounds of Korean had already been learned by the
time the kids were 1. So it looks like you can only transfer what you’ve already got.
The inventory of your sounds gets figured out really soon after birth, and so it’s much
easier to get stuck with that than the structure of your syntax, which you pick up
over your first few years.
Kids picking up a second language still have a lot of learning to do, and their brains
have to grow into their language, through experience and neural development, as we’ll
talk about more in the future. But even if kids do have an easier time than
adults with new languages, they still have to struggle with some of the same problems: transfer
happens from really early on.
But the more aging you’ve done, the harder it is to hone in on your target.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week.
If you established prototypical vowels, you learned that transfer for children
happens as soon as they’ve had a chance to establish a grammar;
that kids learning a new language before seven or eight get a lot of the syntax right;
and that phonology transfers earliest, because it’s mastered earliest.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics
team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back
over to our website, where we have some extra material on this topic.
Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own
personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Khodafez!