 "Photo: Lina Torres '12")
On Thursday evening, Antonella Sorace, professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, spoke in Pendleton about her research on bilingual children in her lecture, “One Brain, Two Languages, Many Advantages.” Bilingual in Italian and English herself, Sorace has devoted her career to researching the effect that bilingualism has on children’s cognitive development, yielding many positive results.
Sorace began by pointing out that many parents and educators assume that promoting bilingualism can cause developmental delays or even ‘language confusion,’ a child speaking only a mixture of the two languages without becoming equally fluent. Sorace then explained that most of the results of her research contradict these assumptions. In fact, bilingual children tend to better understand the structure of language, often becoming more gifted readers than monolingual children.
“In Europe… [bilingualism] is still regarded as special,” she said. “Europe is essentially monolingual.” This differs largely from America, or even Wellesley College, where our diverse, international community brings together many different languages. In fact, this access to and understanding of two cultures through language is one of the many benefits of bilingualism that Sorace exalted.
As a child, Lukiih Cuan ’12 had access to three cultures and four different languages. When she was just one month old, Cuan and her family moved from California back to Venezuela where her parents had been living since they were teenagers. “My mom wanted me to be a US citizen so she wanted me to be born here, but I guess her visa wasn’t ready then,” she said. “She was trying to give me an American education, but we didn’t really have a place here.”
Back in Venezuela, Cuan lived with her grandparents, anti-Communists who fled China in the late 1970s. “They had people they knew there and they were desperate,” she said. With them, Cuan spoke only Chinese. For the next eight years, she and her parents continued to move back and forth between Venezuela and the US, Cuan attending classes taught in Spanish one year, and in English the next.
It is commonly known that children’s brains are like sponges for language with an amazing capability for absorbing new sounds and linguistic structures. For most people, these sponges begin to dry up as they get older. Without use, our brains loose their ability to retain a language and our capacity for learning new languages decreases over time.
“A child’s brain can deal with two, three, even four languages,” Sorace said. “There’s nothing essentially monolingual about the human brain.”
This is why, Sorace explained, it is not only important, but much easier to start early when learning languages. It becomes more of a “spontaneous process” like simply picking it up in school as Cuan did.
When they finally settled in the US, Cuan lost touch with her grandparents, losing her ability to speak Chinese. Today, she is bilingual in English and Spanish, but she claims that she is only able to understand Chinese.
“There’s no acquisition without input,” Sorace noted. In other words, we must hear a language being spoken around us regularly in order to retain our fluency. This, Sorace said, is one of the more difficult aspects of promoting early bilingualism as the opportunity to hear both languages equally does not always present itself in every household.
Like many bilinguals in America, Yuby Hernandez ’13 did not learn English from her parents, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic 25 years ago and still only speak Spanish. “They try, but it’s funny,” Hernandez said. “My Dad spells goodnight ‘g-u-n-a-l.’ With a Spanish accent, that’s what it sounds like.”
Growing up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in Manhattan, Hernandez remembers learning English first from watching television and then from being immersed in an English speaking elementary school. “[In] school, you study English, you write in English, you read in English, you live in English, then at home that’s where you speak Spanish.”
In order to communicate with her grandmother who lives with her family, Talar Keskinyan’s first language was Armenian. Keskinyan ’13 grew up in Long Island with parents who speak Armenian, Turkish and English fluently.
“I learned English in a [pre-school] day care program and then I just learned it through school,” she said.
Since no one in her elementary school spoke Armenian, Keskinyan’s grandmother sat in a chair in her classroom every day for the first year.
“I think she was just there to help me if I needed it. I didn’t go in cold turkey, like no English, but she was there just in case,” she said. “I think my parents wanted me to have that.”
Today, both Keskinyan and Hernandez are continuing to learn third languages and their experiences as bilinguals seem to be helping them along the way. While other students in her German class had trouble with the concept of masculine, feminine and neutral articles, Hernandez said it came more naturally to her from her knowledge of Spanish. “I think I have the tools to learn a language just because I’ve done it before,” Keskinyan said ,who is taking Arabic this semester. “Going into it I guess I felt a little more confident.”
This is consistent with Sorace’s results that bilinguals tend to be better learners of third and fourth languages later in life, especially compared to most adult second language learners. Among the few disadvantages, bilinguals tend to begin speaking later than most monolinguals and develop smaller vocabularies in each language—though Sorace says that they are a small price to pay, and it seems that these bilingual students would agree.
“It just enriches your life so much,” Hernandez said. “[You] get to learn a different culture and you can think in two different ways.”
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