5.4 Plasticity and Language Acquisition

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Do curso por University of Houston System

The Bilingual Brain

136 classificações

University of Houston System

The Bilingual Brain

136 classificações

This course explores the brain bases of bilingualism by discussing literature relevant to differences in age of initial learning, proficiency, and control in the nonverbal, single language and dual-language literature. Participants will learn about the latest research related to how humans learn one or two languages and other cognitive skills.

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Week 5

Office Hours 520:31

5 Practice What You Speak6:26

5.1 Language Loss4:03

5.2 Catastrophic Loss4:45

5.3 Can a Lost Language be Found3:19

5.4 Plasticity and Language Acquisition5:29

5.5 Restructuring Plasticity9:43

5.6 The Dichotic Nature of Language6:26

5.7 What is Predicted by Language Proficiency3:37

5.8 From Everyday to Academic Language5:58

5.9 Academic and Everyday Grammar2:23

5.10 Language and Memory System3:43

5.11 Speech in a Second Language12:15

5.12 Language Learning as a Building Process1:51

Conheça os instrutores

Arturo E. Hernandez
Professor
Psychology

[SOUND] In terms of language,

we talked about Pallier's study in terms of the Korean adoptees,

maintaining some aspect of speech sound processing.

We also have looked at work by Oh and Ow and colleagues.

And work by Hautenstom and colleagues has also found this

preservation of ability to recognize speech sounds,

even after extreme immersion in a foreign language that eventually

becomes the second language, which eventually becomes the best language.

The most familiar language.

Hence the idea of this referring to familiarity and Petri's rule.

What Pallier's study also tells us is,

that there's an incredible amount of plasticity involved in this system.

So, even though children are learning, and they're acquiring lots of knowledge,

there's still a reinforcement that occurs from the environment itself

to bolster that learning, to support it, and to maintain it over time.

And if that environment changes, then what can happen is, the memories and

the knowledge that's contained within a person can change as well.

And it will change, that's what Pallier's study suggests about language.

But then what do people learn during their first years of life?

Are they learning a specific language.

Pallier's results would suggest not really,

because the second language can actually overwrite essentially the first language.

Are they learning some proto-language?

Right, some elementary language that is so

similar to every language in the world, that it can be adapted, changed.

Well that would be surprising if it were true, because,

why would people learn some basic language that's not specific?

When we hear children that are six or seven years of age,

they seem to have quite a bit of knowledge about their native language, and

it's quite specialized.

At least to anybody who sees them.

A more interesting possibility is that in fact, what we learn in

language early in life, can be co-opted or applied to many other languages.

That there's plasticity in the system and

the aspects of language can be reconfigured to fit another language.

There is one literature where the idea and the notion of language deprivation

appears, not like Victor of Aveyron or Jeannie that we discussed earlier.

But it turns out within the American sign language community, until the 70s,

many children did not receive American sign language input, or

ASL as it's called input, until later in their lives.

There is still some debate about what type of input would be the best for children.

Parents sometimes feel that spoken input is important,

that they should learn English.

Other parents feel that ASL input is important early in life.

And in this mix, what has happened is that some children are not exposed to

any language early in life, or

very little language early in life and only come to acquire language later.

So there's actually deprivation or lack of exposure to language at all.

The second thing that happens in the bilingual community,

is that some children will get exposed to English first,

some to ASL first, some of course to very little language.

And so we can ask the question based on what this community looks like,

about whether exposure to language matters.

That is specific language.

Rachel Mayberry and her colleagues have asked this question.

They've asked, does language exposure to a specific language,

help language proficiency in that particular language?

And what they found is that in fact,

what matters is that someone is exposed to a language.

There doesn't seem to appear to be any benefit to being exposed to ASL

earlier, for detecting ASL grammatical violations later.

And there isn't any benefit for being exposed to English earlier in life, and

detecting later, deficits in English.

Rather, it just matters that a language was presented to a child early in life.

Those who learn ASL early in life show a benefit in English, and

those who learned English early in life, show a benefit in ASL.

So it appears that whatever exists within language,

does seem to transfer from one language to the other.

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