Text 3 you have to catch them young…

Bilinguals seem to hold the world in the palm of their hand. They cruise across frontiers with enviable ease, unburdened by phrase books or dictionary. They shift gear from one language and culture to another with an ease that makes monoglots despair. But how do bilinguals learn in the first place to operate in two languages?

To find out, psychologists at Barcelona University selected 30 babies aged four months - ten from families where only Catalan was spoken, ten where only Spanish was spoken and ten from bilingual Spanish-Catalan families - and read them a story in Spanish and Catalan. Psychologist Nuria Sebastian, who is from a Spanish-Catalan family, said: 'We wanted to see if babies of that age could distinguish between the languages.' Their recognition of a language was judged by the speed with which they looked to the source of the sound. The researchers found that all the babies could distinguish clearly between their maternal language and a foreign one.

'Using languages as similar as Catalan and Spanish meant we were testing their ability to make quite subtle linguistic distinctions - although we don't yet know if they were distinguishing by rhythm or by sounds,' says Sebastian.

The first experiment of this kind, it shows just how early the brain is able to respond to one or more particular languages. The study also showed that bilingual babies take longer to respond to voices than monolingual ones. 'We're not sure why but we think it is probably because they are having to decide which language to plug into,' says Sebastian, who hopes to follow this with further studies into the mechanisms by which children begin to handle two languages simultaneously.

Sebastian says: 'Neurologists know how messages travel through the brain. But very little is known about the different ways language is processed by monolinguals and bilinguals - and there must be differences.' Infants learn languages better when they are young, she says, because the brain is so flexible. It is the first few months that seem to be crucial because there is a progressive reduction in the infant's ability to distinguish between two languages. At two-and-a-half months a baby can make this distinction. At four months it can only distinguish a foreign language from its mother tongue. At six months the baby can distinguish only between the vowels of its mother tongue and the foreign language. And by ten months babies have lost the ability to distinguish between foreign sounds.

It seems that the language an infant hears every day influences the structure of the developing pathways in the brain so that they are programmed to pick up only relevant sounds. After these pathways are set down, they become increasingly rigid. So if a child has not learnt a second language before this inflexibility sets in, it is unlikely to become truly bilingual. Several studies have shown three years to be a cut-off point.

Being bilingual does not only affect language use. In tests judging creative thinking power, bilingual children have performed better. If you ask them, say, how many uses they can think of for a brick, they tend to come back with more answers than the monoglots. Psychologists suggest that this is because they naturally distinguish word and meaning, so are relatively free from the conceptual constraints that language imposes. Anecdotally, bilingual children have more sensitive communication skills. It may be that they have to learn very early to be aware of the listener's needs because they have to decide which language to speak. They soon come to see language as an integral part of the relationship.

However, even monoglot adults need not despair. They can still learn fast because they have advanced intellectual skills. But because they're operating on an analytic level, with most adults their speaking improves faster than their listening. In children it's probably the other way around, says Dr Winifred Strange, a psychologist at South Florida University. Her research has confirmed that it is the listening which a baby does, long before it can talk, that enables it to learn a foreign language much more effectively than an adult.

The lesson for adults who want to learn a foreign language fluently, says Strange, is to listen as much as possible - which can be as easy as watching television programmes from a neighbouring country. At the same time, don't assume your children are watching too much TV - they could be effortlessly equipping themselves with a valuable skill that no amount of homework will ever give them.

(From the European Magazine)