Freedom (post 4)

This day seemed hopeless. Going through traffic on my way home from school I faced the usual frantic and pitiless commuters. As traffic increased the thoughts circulating through my mind were rather unpleasant. As I approached a red light I felt a vibration on my leg, irritated I looked down to see an incoming call from my father. Being flooded with the anxiety of school and the hideous traffic situation I was not very enthusiastic for having a little chit chat with the big man, which usually consists of me being scolded for procrastinating too much. I ignored the call and put the phone away, within seconds I felt another vibration, I looked to see that I have 3 text messages from my maternal cousins. The first one read “Gadaffi was just shot!!”  The second one read “LIBYA IS OFFICIALLY FREE.”  Immediately my mother came to mind, she comes from a Libyan heritage and has three sisters and four brothers in Libya, with whom we lost contact for a long period. My mother would shudder when she heard reporters on the television delivering the numbers of recent casualties, but always kept hope.

Muammar Gadaffi was the ruler of Libya since 1969, when he lead a military coup which overthrew king Idris. He abolished the former Libyan constitution, and pushed his own ideologies towards the people. In 2011 the freedom of the press index labeled Libya the most censored state in the Middle East and North Africa. About 20.74% of Libyan citizens were unemployed, and about one-third lived below the national poverty line. Over 16% of families had none of its members earning a stable income, while 43.3% had just one. As time progressed the people of Libya were fed up with the lack of freedom and the increase of political corruption, as a result they put on protests in February, in which over 500 protesters took part. Being inspired by the Egyption and Tunisian revolution  the National Conference for  the Libyan Opposition asked that all groups opposed to the Gaddafi government protest on February 17th. The protest resulted in protesters being fired at with live ammunition. Later Rebel forces were created in order to fight the Gadaffi government, and violence continued on until the day i received those text messages.

                As i stared at my steering wheel pondering about what will happen next, I heard two continuous sharp horns edging me on to go since the light just turned green. After hearing the good news I didn’t even bother to give a slight tap of the horn for retaliation. On my way home I was a bit skeptical on the details surrounding the death of Gadaffi, because I thought it was too soon for him to be both suddenly apprehended and killed in the same day, but I hoped for the best. There was an incredible feeling of both joy and relief for my mother since she had endured a lot of emotional hardship, concerning her family and not having contact with them, and for the people of Libya who struggled through day to day life, living under a tyrant. As I pulled onto my driveway my heart was racing, the thought of opening the door to my families cheering faces greeting me and embracing me into their arms with tears flowing. But as I opened the door I was in shock.

                I saw my family sitting at the television screen with an extreme look of shock in their eyes. I turned my head towards the television screen and I saw many Libyan rebels brutally beating up and verbally abusing Gadaffi in Arabic. It was a horrific sight, he was bloody and looked rather confused and was trying to say something as everyone beat him. My father saw me and said in a shaky tone “my son our brothers and sisters can smell the fragrance of freedom.”  My father told my younger brothers to go on into their rooms, for this was not something for them to see. My eyes turned towards my mother who looked at the Television screen silently with tears flowing down her face. I ran to her and gave her a hug and she patted my head and told me that my grandpa called from Libya and told her that her brothers and sisters are safe and with him. I could not help but to burst into tears because In reality I had lost all hope for them, because of the continuous massacres in Libya. I went towards my father and gave him a hug.

         

   At last, the day arrived when the innocent young didn’t have to cover their heads with fear when they roamed the streets. When families rejoiced in seeing their loved ones, and when freedom rained on the country of Libya and its people.

Bilingual Babies

Researchers at the University of Washington are analyzing the early years of both bilingual and monolingual children in order to evaluate their contrasting variances in behavior.

Previous research had suggested that children raised in a bilingual household were more likely to have confusion and be delayed mentally while trying to balance two different methods of verbal communication in their brain. However, recent study confirms the refutation of this,

Researchers have discovered new ways to analyze infant behavior, in order to determine their perception of sounds, words, and languages, and what they consider familiar. A method used for this is assessing the neurologic activity of an infant’s brain as they hear language, and then comparing the responses with the words that the child learns in later years.  This aids in increasing our understanding of how listening shapes the early brain.

Recently researches at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses in order to examine the differences between monolingual and bilingual. Researchers found that that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could distinguish between phonetic sounds, whether they were communicated in the language they’re parents usually spoke or in an inferior language they never really heard their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

It is suggested by researchers that this proves there is a process of “neural commitment,” in which the brain of an infant trains itself to understand and perceive only one language. In Contrast bilingual babies developed in a quite different way, when it came to 6 or 9 months the infants did not spot any difference in phonetic sounds for both languages. As it came to 10 to 12 months they had the capability to differentiate sounds for both languages.

“They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, the co-director of the institute for learning and brain sciences at the University of Washington, and one of the authors of the study, “what the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies experience keeps them open.” 

The perception and the ability to start learning language can begin earlier than 6 months of age. Even in the womb babies are able to recognize the rhythms and sounds of language. Newborns are usually inclined to prefer languages that have a similar rhythm to the one they have heard during fetal development.

Janet werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies comprehend language and how that characterizes their learning. In a recent study Werker along with her associates suggest that babies born to bilingual mothers favor both of the languages over any other, and are able to grasp the difference between the two.

In another study, older infants were shown silent videotapes of adults speaking, 4 month olds could discriminate two different languages by analyzing mouth and facial motions, when the language changed they simultaneously changed their expression. BY 8 months the monolingual infants stopped responding to the variances in language, while the bilingual babies kept giving active responses.

Ellen Bialystok, a well knowned research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto has discovered that bilingual children develop extra skills, along with their mixed vocabularies. They learn different ways to solve logic problems or methods of handling multitasking, these skills are considered part of the brain’s executive function.

These abilities are found in the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain.

Further research suggests that Children that are raised in a bilingual household tend to be "more cognitively flexible,” than children raised in a household where only one language is spoken.

Dr. Patricia kuhl’s research group determined after extensive research that the way babies perceive and map language out in their brains, is a consequence the social setting they were in.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2016472193_brainlanguagesbaby11.html