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I have no idea whether I'm skimming these things right, but if you're interested in the subjects of reading, dyslexia, and/or foreign language learning, take a look at these papers of Patricia Kuhl's, especially this one: A perceptual interference account of acquisition difficulties for non-native phonemes.
Babies can distinguish all of the phonemes in all of the world's languages, a figure that comes to 600 consonants and 200 vowels, apparently.
Then, over the next months, babies get better at distinguishing the phonemes of their own languages while getting worse at distinguishing the phonemes of all the other languages, a process Dr. Kuhl says is not "subtractive" in nature. (I am failing to understand precisely what she means by "not subtractive" at the moment, but I have an idea, and I can see that it's important.)
Eventually the 5-month old "citizen of the world" becomes a 12-month old American citizen or Japanese citizen or French citizen and so on.
Kuhl has also found that a baby's phoneme-distinguishing abilities predict his language abilities later on.
So..... it strikes me that once you've become a linguistic citizen of a country you may be in an analogous position vis a vis other languages to that of a dyslexic child is vis a vis his own language (only worse, I would think). Once you've become a native speaker, you have acquired a major deficit in phomenic awareness for the phonemes of the foreign language or languages you would like to learn.
I think Michael Merzenich was attempting to use computers to teach English speakers to "hear" Japanese phonemes (possibly by slowing down & stretching out the Japanese phonemes we have trouble distinguishing?)
I wonder whether something like that would make it possible for an adult to regain a 6-month old's ability to hear the phonemes of other languages, thus making it easier for the adult to learn the second language?
This reminds me of something else.
It's been common, in my experience at least, for people who've spent time living in a foreign country to say that they "learned the language by watching TV."
Ed is fluent in French, and he's always said he learned French by living in France and watching French TV. Which never really made sense. He wasn't watching French TV with subtitles. He was watching French TV in French.
Other people who are fluent in foreign languages they picked up as adults have told me the same thing. Not only that, but invariably they advise me to do the same if I want to learn a language to fluency. That an adult can become fluent in a foreign language by watching TV in that language is an article of faith amongst the bilingual, as far as I can tell. (Amongst the bilingual who became bilingual after childhood, that is.)
For sure nobody ever says, "I learned French by reading French."
Well, this makes sense if phonemic awareness is as important to acquiring a second language as it is to acquiring a first. (Is it? Do we know?) In fact, people like Ed make a phonemic argument for learning French by watching French TV, which is that actors speak more clearly than ordinary citizens.
Kuhl's work also shows that there likely isn't a "critical period" for language learning based in time and biology (i.e. the advent of adolence producing some kind of hormonal and/or brain change that makes it impossible to learn to speak an unaccented foreign language thereafter). Instead, the experience of making a "neural commitment" to your own language makes it progressively more difficult to distinguish the phonemes of other languages.
In short, the ability to perceive foreign language phonemes isn't precisely lost, though it is equally not something you could will back into being.
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All of this may be deeply wrong.
I'm going to have to stop skimming and start reading.
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Just in case it isn't deeply wrong, I'm wondering whether that subscription to Puerta del Sol Audio Magazine I was contemplating a few years back might be a good idea.
Or, better yet, I should go back to my lapsed plan to start watching Spanish & French television every day.
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A little PowerPoint can be a beautiful thing.
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Ed is fluent in French, and he's always said he learned French by living in France and watching French TV
In grad school I had the opportunity to study for a year in Germany and studied German intensively for about a year before getting there. I am bilingual (Eng/Span) and had studied some Italian in undergrad. While I never formally learned French, it was amazing how much I learned by watching the news from a French station (a roomate was fluent in French and watched regularly). I learned quite a bit of French watching the news (not to fluency, but still). Strangely, I rarely watched the news in German or even English, for that matter. The point is, YES, watching foreign language programming regularly and in context has true learning value (unless, of course, it's reality television we're talking about.)
I suspect that a part of the advantage of listening to television is that actors and talking heads speak more clearly than the average person on the street but less clearly than a language teacher. IME, language teachers teach platonic forms of a language's phonemes -- forms that are very seldom used in precisely those forms in speech by normal people.
In addition, television uses common idioms from the language, not the artificial phrases used by teachers.
I suspect the combination is quite useful to a language learner.
Linguistics! My favourite subject!
I find that even after puberty, etc., you can "force" native fluency -- not through just sheer immersion -- but in actively creating mental concepts for the things you hear. Not just "translating" back to your native language, but to your real native native language, the language of the brain, symbolic thought, etc.
In babies, concept-creation is often automatic. They don't have any previous language to translate to. Babies seem often rather idle but inside their minds are hard at work creating concepts for the languages they hear.
Older people simply don't focus all their attention on language, so acquisition ability decreases. They may also try to translate rather than actively link back to the "language" of symbolic thought before any language was ever learnt.
"
In addition, television uses common idioms from the language, not the artificial phrases used by teachers.
I suspect the combination is quite useful to a language learner."
Mmm! It's only from my French clan (where I saw from the chatspeak) with informal contractions like "t'as" and "t'es" and syllable compression "tout l'monde" that suddenly I was able to decipher a lot of speech I hadn't deciphered before.
This is where sms-speak and internet shorthand has actually *helped* me with my language skills.
Rodolfo Llinas says there are essentially no humans who are as good in their second language as they are in their first; this has to do with "neural commitment".... (same principle as Michael Jordan being good at basketball but not baseball)
He says you have to specialize, and that specializing always means being much better at one thing and much worse at another.
Still, I met a woman whose sister worked for the foreign service a few years ago.
She told me that the foreign service has formal rankings for how fluent you are in another language that apparently go all the way up to native fluency.
She said there are a handful of people who achieve native fluency (I believe we're talking about people who achieve this as adults, not people who've spoken both languages since birth).
No one knows why those people can do what they can do, apparently.
Her sister was one of them.
I think she said her sister can carry on learning new languages, too.
We knew a high school girl from Israel who said that after you've become fluent in 3 languages it's easy to "pick up" new ones.
Her boyfriend apparently felt the same way. (He was fluent in French & English, I think - not sure whether he had a 3rd language).
"Rodolfo Llinas says there are essentially no humans who are as good in their second language as they are in their first; this has to do with "neural commitment"...."
I don't completely agree with this. In many multilingual environments, there is usually a language that is "dominant" over another, especially where languages have come into contact with each other as result of colonialisation. This leads to people having spending more time on one language than others
It's rare to have a situation where two languages will often be on an equal footing in a single certain community.
On the other hand, you have communities where everyone can use sign language even if they're not blind and deaf, and the sign language is often totally unrelated to the spoken language, and yet can be both pursued to equal fluency.
In Singapore it is considered very good if there's a student who can both pursue their L1 and L2 to very high degrees of fluency (including being well-read in both, etc.) but not exceptional. Usually for the other students, they don't have the opportunities to pursue both languages to equal competency. For the parents might not be that skilled themselves, and their extended family might be prone to speaking one language over the other.
That's why people who can take "Higher Mother Tongue" fall into the Special Stream in Singapore, for the top 10%.
But note it is top 10%; it's not extremely exceptional, etc.
She told me that the foreign service has formal rankings for how fluent you are in another language that apparently go all the way up to native fluency.
The rankings apply despite being brought up bilingually. You are usually asked to indicate your dominant (mother) language which in my case is English. My ranking is native fluency for Spanish.
As for additional languages being easier to learn... very true. It may be easier for me than for some, but I do have a dear friend who is a polyglot. She easily transitions from Spanish, English, French, German to Italian both conversationally, academically and in writing. She even picked up Hindi while living in India. Her children see to be following in her footsteps. It's amazing and I'm so jealous!
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