Why should my child learn a second language so young?
Continued... Researchers and scientists of varying specialties
ranging from Linguistics to Psychology to Neuroscience have been asking themselves
'How do young children learn languages so seemingly effortlessly?' There are
various theories that look at language development in childhood from different
perspectives. One of the most quoted and notable of these theories was constructed
by the linguist Noam Chomsky in the 1950's. Chomsky's theory states that language
learning in early childhood is like an instinct, similar to the instincts of
spiders making spider webs, song birds learning certain songs, and salmon returning
up stream to spawn. Chomsky believes that humans have a genetically based
ability to acquire any language at an early age and he called this Universal
Grammar. Universal Grammar is the part of the human brain that allows
young children to distinguish amongst all of the world's languages from birth
or as more recent researches have discovered from within the womb. Universal
Grammar is the system that children naturally use to acquire the language(s)
that they are exposed to so thoroughly and seemingly effortlessly. Consider
for a moment the fact that any healthy young child can acquire any language.
An American child born in the United States that moves with his parents to
China at an early age and is exposed to Mandarin in his social activities will
learn Mandarin. A child that is raised in a household where the mother speaks
Spanish to him and the father speaks English can learn both languages simultaneously
and can do this by his third year of life, before he can even tie his shoes
or completely dress himself!
Back
to Why Learn Young Page...