I was watching Disney’s Tarzan with my baby girl one day and it reminded me of this case study that I had read in one of my psychology textbooks when I was studying as an undergraduate.
The town folks at Aveyron discovered a young boy about the age of 12 years old wandering around naked. Covered with scars all over his body, his behaviour was like that of an animal and he was not able to speak. It is estimated that he might have lived in the wild since 4 years old after his parents abandoned him. His sudden appearance then gave researchers at that time a golden chance to study him and find out once and for all whether we are products of nature or nurture.
One of those who studied him was Dr. Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, who was determined to teach the Wild Boy of Aveyron (as he was called) how to speak and communicate socially with others.
Despite his best efforts, the boy never managed to communicate or speak except for a handful of words even after 5 years of training. It was believed that either he was autistic or that he simply missed the window of opportunity for language acquisition, which had been determined by researchers as between 2-7 years of age. Personally, I’m more inclined to the latter.
Which brings me back to Tarzan. I thought it was incredulous that Tarzan was able to learn English in such a short period of time and speak it so well. He had almost no human contact so how was that even possible? It’s generally much harder (although not impossible) for children/adults to pick up a new language if they’ve never been exposed to it during the window of language acquisition.
That is why, when asked by people (after they found out I was majoring in child psychology) what is the most important thing to teach an infant, I always reply “Language. Expose them to as many languages as possible.”
Studies have shown that if you expose a child to native speakers of more than 1 language at a young age, instead of being confused like most people think, they are actually able to understand all of them. My father is an example of someone who’s able to speak 3 languages (English, Chinese & Malay) and 3 dialects (Cantonese, Teochew & Hokkien).
Having been a private tuition teacher to primary and secondary school students for almost a decade (9 years!), I discovered that I could easily get my student’s Maths or Science grades from a F to an A (if they worked really hard at it) but I could not improve their language abilities further than a B no matter how hard I try.
So thankfully in the multicultural society of Singapore, my little girl is exposed to many different languages, two of which she is now mastering quite well: English and Chinese. Three, if you count Singlish =)
But above all, it’s the language of love that you communicate across to your child that is the most important to him or her, in whatever that language may be.
Have a great week of ahead!
What do you think? Are you bilingual? Are your children learning a 2nd language?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer, research psychologist and mother of one in Singapore, Madeline Heng. You can find Madeline at her personal blog, MadPsychMum @ University of Motherhood.
The photograph used in this post is credited to Surlygirl. It has a Flickr Creative Commons attribution license.
You’re absolutely right ….. except that latest research proves that the cut-off age for “mother-tongue” language acquisition is around 14 years. Apart from my own reaserch as part of both Linguistic and Psychology studies, I experienced this phenomenon first-hand. I was 8 years old when my parents emigrated from Italy to South Africa. I had never been exposed to any foreign languages and couldn’t even distinguish between the 2 official languages at the time (English and Afrikaans). By the end of my first year in S.A. I spoke English and Afrikaans well enough to be understood by the locals. Now English is my “mother-tongue” in the sense that it’s the language I dream in, count in and am most comfortable expressing myself in. I can still speak, read and write in Italian and Afrikaans but not effortessly. A friend of my mom’s (who had also emigrated from Italy) and couldn’t speak a word of English when she got here (as an adult) can now understand and speak English (badly) and it’s obvious that the language she’s comfortable in is still Italian (despite having spent most of her adult life here).
The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron is a controversial one. We were taught that as long as ANY language is learnt in the “critical period of language acquisition”, learning other languages is possible. What is apparently not possible is to be able to speak as well as a native speaker if you’re older than 14 years of age when first exposed to the language.
That said, I absolutely agree that it’s best to expose babies to as many languages as possible as early as possible, because that makes it much easier for them to learn other languages as they get older. I spoke only Italian to my kids until they went to Pre-School. Both of them can understand Italian quite well … they just can’t speak it fluently yet. However, I know that it will only take a month in Italy for them to fully “get it”. My sister moved back to Italy when she was 18 and could barely string two sentences together. Now Italian is her “mother tongue” again, even though she’s still fluent in English. 🙂
Wow I never knew that! Thanks for the knowledge (as you can see I’m no linguist!) haha. That’s good because that means more hope for all of us! 🙂
Absolutely! I actually learnt all that because I was sick and tired of being harshly judged by my Italian relatives for speaking English at home! 🙂
Oh, I’m in South Africa too 🙂
I have a friend who came to South Africa at the age of 9, from Belgium. He now speaks English, Afrikaans, Flemish and French fluently.
Totally agree, Madeline. The language of love is the most universal, most important, most widely felt in terms of its impact on our children’s lives. (Psst, may I confess, I also think Singlish should totally be another language. Like, totally.) 😉
I know right? Haha.
I’m bilingual. My parents spoke to me in their home language, and exposed me from a young age to friends who spoke only English. When I was about 5, one of my friends started to speak my language to me, and I kind of “lost” English for about a year. But it came right back to me.
I believe in bilingualism (or even multilingualism). By the theories of neuroplasticity, I believe it grows our brains more. I wish to learn to speak French and Mandarin, but it’s quite difficult at my age (22).
Mandarin is my 2nd language and even I am struggling with it cos my parents hardly spoke much mandarin to me when I was young. By the time I started learning it in school it was so hard to catch up to native mandarin speakers. But like what Simone said, it’s never too late to learn I guess. Most important is to keep practising it! =)
I found that having a language acquisition advantage at an early age was a common theme that many parenting books seemed to agree about. I started learning a second language in school in the US at age 14. My daughter is learning French and Mandarin, and I speak some French to my 1 year old. I feel like this is a gift I can give them that they can take with them throughout their lives.
As for me, I really want to speak French better, and there are so many other languages I want to learn!!
Lovely post!
Jen 🙂
Thanks Jen! It’s great that she’s learning so many languages! I would like my girl to learn a 3rd language too =)
Did someone Simona say one can learn till 14 years of age? I want my so to learn so many languages and I was disappointed he was already 6. He knows 2 languages (English, Tamil-my mother tongue) very flently. But I was hoping he gets to learn 2 more widely used languages here. I noticed him speaking in this 3rd language – just few phrases and broken sentences to get by and I was jubilant. Now I am into teaching him this 3rd new language – Hindi. I think lang. acquisition happens until 10 to 14 yrs… because otherwise I could not explain him talking all those new languages…
Ah, love! Never can one really explain motherly love and maternal bond! Great post!
Wow that’s nice! I think the more languages the merrier =)
Absolutely, before age 14 he’s able to learn to speak many languages as well as a native speaker. He can continue to learn language his whole life, but it does get harder as you get older. My cousin speaks Italian, English and Greek …. and he only started learning Greek as an adult because he married a Greek woman! 🙂 His 2 little girls speak English fluently (they live in London now) and are also exposed to Greek and Italian by the extended family. 🙂
My 2 year old ‘speaks’ both Norwegian and English, as his father speaks English to him!
I come from a family that speaks many languages. My father speaks 6, my mother speaks 3 (and understands phrases in a few others). I only speak 3, French, English and Hebrew. I have taught both of my children French and English at home. My son is learning Spanish and Hebrew at school, and my mother and I use Hebrew as a code language at home when we don’t want the kids to understand (incidentally, that is how I learned Hebrew…my parents spoke it to each other so that I wouldn’t understand. That worked out pretty well for me 🙂 ).
That is funny, Maman Aya! 🙂