SECOND LANGUAGE IS GOOD CHILDHOOD MIND MEDICINE

Hey there, did you know that teaching our little ones a second language can be just the tonic for their developing minds? That's right! Our friends, the language experts over at Cornell University, have some fascinating findings to share.

Once upon a time, some folks were worried that learning a second language might mix up a child's mind, delay their language development, or even affect their cognitive abilities. Guess what? The smart scientists at the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab (CLAL) have discovered that the exact opposite is true. In fact, children who can speak two languages are better at keeping their attention focused, even when distractions surround them.

Our language-loving pals, Professor Barbara Lust, a whiz in developmental psychology and linguistics, and her collaborator, Sujin Yang, have discovered that this 'distraction-dodging' skill is essential. It's this skill that helps our kiddos to set goals and reach them, even when there's a lot going on around them. This can really give them a head start in school and help them succeed academically.

In the simplest terms, being bilingual can give a child's brain a big boost. As Professor Lust puts it, "Cognitive advantages follow from becoming bilingual. These cognitive advantages can contribute to a child's future academic success."

How do you help a child learn a second language? According to our expert friends, the best way is to surround the child with a second language. Create an environment where the language is in the air they breathe, the games they play, and the songs they sing. Children who learn a second language in this kind of immersive setting can do just as well with grammar as their English-speaking friends, says Yang, who is now sharing her knowledge with students at the University of Toronto at Scarborough and York University in Toronto.

The earlier we start teaching our little ones a second language, the better. They'll pick it up faster and will be more likely to speak it just like a native speaker.

Professor Lust has been studying how children learn languages for over 30 years, exploring more than 20 different languages and cultures. She's been trying to understand which parts of language learning are naturally built into us and which parts we learn. She's also looking into when children start learning languages and how learning more than one language can affect a child's cognitive development.

She says that one of the most amazing things about human development is learning language. According to her, it's truly extraordinary "how well equipped children are, beginning at birth, to accomplish the complex task of learning language."

Over the past five years, Lust and Yang have been working together to study the effects of bilingualism on young children. They have led a series of studies with children aged 3 to 6 years and compared their findings with adults. They've co-authored several papers together.

Their findings, along with research from other labs worldwide, show that children can learn more than one language, and if they're surrounded by the languages, they'll pick them up naturally. This just adds to the wonder of how children can acquire more than one language at once.

With the support of the National Science Foundation-funded Virtual Center for the study of Language Acquisition (VCLA), Lust, Yang, and their team are also studying how young children learn English for the first time at 3 years of age through immersion in local nursery schools.

*This article is adapted from the Cornell College of Human Ecology Web site."