A Gift of Language

Bringing up baby bilingual is a good thing, experts say. Kids have a much easier time learning other tongues than do adults.

My son is only 22 months old, but even at this age it’s easy to distinguish which traits he’s inherited from which parent. For instance, it’s obvious he got his hair color, his affinity for Diet Pepsi and french fries, and his demonstrated ability to sit quietly through an entire college baseball game from me.

My wife, on the other hand, is responsible for our son’s quick temper, his inability to hit the curveball and his infatuation with the Spanish-language soap opera “Alondra.”

But there is one thing he seems to have gotten from both of us: our languages.

Fatima was born in Nicaragua and speaks Spanish as her first language. I was born in Southern California, which means I begin most of my sentences with the word dude. From this mix, our son, Marcos, is being introduced to an increasingly familiar aspect of life in Southern California — a bilingual home.

In more than half the households in Los Angeles, English is already a second language; if demographic trends continue, Spanish will become the area’s dominant language before our son enters high school. That could make the ability to speak a language other than English almost a prerequisite by the time Marcos joins the work force, whether he wants to be a corporate chief executive or a fry cook at McDonald’s.

Yet when Fatima and I decided to expose Marcos to both Spanish and English from birth, it wasn’t only to groom him for future employment. (That’s what the back-yard batting cage is for.) We hoped to use language as a way to introduce our son to the customs, the cultures — as well as the grandparents — he has inherited from our two countries. And, according to linguistics experts, those are only some of the benefits that come with learning a second language as a child.

“Bilingualism is a richness,” says Alma Flor Ada, a linguistics professor at the University of San Francisco and the author of more than 200 children’s books. “I believe that languages are power. They’re one of the most valuable tools that people can have.”

And, says the prevailing research, the best time to develop that tool is as a child. Only a very tiny percentage of people who take up a second language as adults will learn to speak it without an accent, whereas children who are just learning to speak have demonstrated an uncanny ability to speak multiple tongues with the proficiency of a native.

Most linguists agree that there is a biological basis for language acquisition. But a heated debate rages over how much the input of parents and other external agents matter. “Innatists,” led by Noam Chomsky of MIT’s famed linguistics department, believe that children are biologically programmed for language, while “social interactionists” argue that children develop language skills from clues in the environment. But where second languages are concerned, virtually all serious theorists agree that introduction at an early age is important.

“The prime age (for a language) to be acquired naturally and easily for all human beings is when they are acquiring their first language,” says Ada, a Cuban by birth who, despite more than 20 years in this country, still speaks English with a noticeable accent. “So I believe that language should be taught in childhood and facilitated in childhood.”

Steven Pinker, author of “The Language Instinct” (HarperCollins, 1995) and a professor in the cognitive science department at MIT, says learning another language “starts to get a bit harder after age 6. But after puberty, the bottom drops out. Puberty is where the serious cutoff comes.”

The problem is not one of hearing, nor of understanding the grammatical and phonetic patterns of a language — skills that, arguably, are more readily understood later in life. Instead, it’s a question of motor skills.

“The sound system is what’s really lacking after 6 or 7,” says Suzanne Flynn, a colleague of Pinker’s at MIT. “Children, by 6 months, really zero in on what are the unique sound features (of language). And they almost block out or ignore those sounds that are not going to determine and characterize the languages they are going to be speaking. There’s a set of instructions that are given to the vocal apparatus — the glottis, the tongue, the lips, everything — to make the unique set of sounds” inherent to a particular language.

There are, however, some drawbacks to exposing a child to its own confusing Tower of Babble. For one thing, children raised with multiple languages often begin to speak a little later than those raised in a single-language environment. But the setback is only temporary and, over time, learning to make sense from such confusion can prove beneficial.

Ada, who has a daughter fluent in four languages and three other bilingual children, says kids exposed to multiple languages as infants develop something that psychologists have labeled “cognitive flexibility,” which makes them better adapted to problem-solving later on in life.

“They’re better prepared to face new situations,” she says. “They already have two viewpoints on the world, two outlooks on the world. Because language is more than just a system of symbols. It’s connected to culture.”

But not everyone agrees that it’s a good idea to immerse a child in a second language. In Texas recently, District Court Judge Samuel Kiser, presiding over a child custody hearing, ruled that a mother’s decision to speak Spanish to her 5-year-old daughter was akin to child abuse.

“A lot of parents are afraid of raising their children bilingually . . . because they feel their child will be put at a disadvantage in terms of, say, schooling,” says MIT’s Flynn. “That’s based on a real misunderstanding of what language is. In principal, the human mind is unique in that it has this infinite capacity to learn languages.”

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While Marcos has the advantage of two bilingual parents, even parents with no foreign- language skills can provide their young children with a solid foundation for a second language. Hiring housekeepers or nannies fluent in languages other than English is perhaps the easiest way, although in Southern California tuning in to radio and television programs in foreign languages or enrolling young children in preschools where English is not the dominant language can also help. Studies have shown that children born in one country but reared in a country with a different language have been able to return to their birthplace as teen-agers and quickly learn to speak their birth language like a native.

“The elite people in the past learned language at home from . . . a tutor. They could hire somebody just to live at home to speak a foreign language to their children,” says Ada, whose daughter learned German from a neighbor. “We don’t have that luxury today. But if you have a . . . helper working in your house and that person speaks another language, why not have that person teach the child the language?”

English, Ada says, will come naturally.

“You can’t bring up a child in this country without that child learning English,” she says. “It’s just not possible. So English is a language that is going to be acquired anyway.”

My own completely independent field survey supports those findings. In English, Marcos has already mastered a number of words, including hi, bye, ball and Daddy and Mommy. His Spanish vocabulary is much smaller, consisting mainly of pan, agua, adios and bate. But he seems to have grasped the meanings of a number of simple commands in Spanish, responding correctly to damelo (give it to me), ven or venga (come here) and no (no).



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