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
I do like how your first "paragraph" is short and gives the info about what you're going to be talking about. It does sound really typical when you say "Researchers at the University of Washington," you might want to consider making a hook to draw in your audience. Your choice of photo is on the line of supplementing, just because it draws a lot of user attention away from the text. At the same time, it's also showing the process of the experiment, which is very important. You sentence and paragraph structure was good, I felt that headers might help the fluidity overall.
ReplyDeleteI like that your introduction makes the subject of the article very clear in a concise way. You text is well organized and well broken up into good sized paragraphs. There is only one paragraph that I feel needs more information and that is near the end when you mention where in the brain the some abilities take place. I feel that this sentence is a little isolated form the rest of the text because there is missing information. Maybe you could talk a little bit about where language takes place in the brain and how these other skills are relevant to that. You could also include an image or diagram of the brain and its language areas.
ReplyDeleteVery good article overall!