{"id":3217,"date":"2017-10-10T10:14:51","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T14:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.little-sponges.com\/?p=3217"},"modified":"2018-03-21T12:38:58","modified_gmt":"2018-03-21T16:38:58","slug":"early-bilingualism-helps-learning-languages-later-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.little-sponges.com\/index.php\/2017\/10\/10\/early-bilingualism-helps-learning-languages-later-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Bilingualism Helps With Learning Languages Later in Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Bilingual people may be better equipped to learn new languages than those who only speak one language, according to a study published in the academic journal\u00a0Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.<\/p>

The research points to a distinct language-learning benefit for people who grow up bilingual or learn another language at an early age.<\/p>

A team of researchers paired 13 bilingual college students who grew up in the United States with Mandarin-speaking parents, and learned both English and Mandarin at an early age, against a group of 16 monolingual college students, who spoke only English.<\/p>

The researchers studied Mandarin-English bilinguals because both of these languages differ structurally from the new language being learned.<\/p>

The students were tasked with learning to speak and understand a 13-word artificial language called Brocanto2.\u00a0\u00a0They studied Brocanto2, which is similar in structure to Romance languages such as Spanish and French, over the course of about a week. Using an artificial language, which has been used in other studies, allowed the researchers to completely control the learners’ exposure to the language.<\/p>

At both earlier and later points of training, learners’ brain patterns were examined with EEG electrodes on their scalps, while they listened to Brocanto2 sentences. This captures the natural brain-wave activity as the brain processes language.<\/p>

While advising that “caution is warranted in generalizing findings from artificial grammar learning to natural language learning,” the researchers found clear differences between the bilingual and monolingual test groups.<\/p>

By the end of the first day of training, bilingual students’ brains showed a brain-wave pattern typically found when native speakers process their language. The monolingual students’ brains only began to exhibit the brain-wave pattern by the last day of training.<\/p>

“There has been a lot of debate about the value of early bilingual language education,” study co-author Sara Grey, a professor of applied linguistics at Georgetown University. “Now, with this small study, we have novel brain-based data that points towards a distinct language-learning benefit for people who grow up bilingual.”<\/p>

Read more on this study at\u00a0Georgetown University<\/span><\/a>. Article provided by Education Week<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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