Bilingual Babies -- a Sign of the Times

Teaching Toddlers New Languages Can Help Them Later in Life By HARI SREENIVASAN

Jan. 30, 2007 — Think playtime, but with a purpose.

From California to Connecticut, toddlers sit on the laps of their parents or caretakers and arespoken to in Italian, French, Spanish and, increasingly, Chinese.

They sit in circles, distracted by cuddly toys, at schools such as the Language Workshop forChildren in New York or informal groups organized by parents.

For mom Karen Albright, having her 2-year-old daughter, Carolyn, attend French and Chineseclasses seems natural. Carolyn "already speaks Spanish and English, because her baby sitterspeaks Spanish," says Albright.

Encouraging a caregiver to speak in his or her native language to the baby makes sense toparents like Raj and Mamta Purohit of New Jersey. In the long run, they believe their daughterAnaka's exposure to native and grammatically correct Chinese is better for her than exposure tosometimes broken English. The Purohits see it as turning a possible liability into a bonus.

Mandarin (the dominant form of Chinese in the world) is not an easy language to pick up. TheForeign Service Institute ranks it about four times as time-intensive to learn as French, but thesebabies (many as young as 6-months old) are getting a head start. And if the success of thecourses at the Language Workshop for Children and the rise in advanced placement languagecourses at high schools around the country are any indication, the popularity is surging.

Every Advantage

Susan and Jason Krause want to give their son, Gavin, every advantage. Jason Krause managesreal estate assets in China, and beyond the possibility of preparing his toddler to take over thefamily business one day, he also believes that teaching his son other languages is crucial forGavin's overall development as a global citizen.

"I think it's important to show others in the world that we're not so U.S.-centric," explains Gavin's father. "Everyone should speak English, but we're going to make an attempt to speaktheir language as well. It helps culturally when you're doing business or in social engagements,just to learn what other people are about."

Parents are also learning more about the developmental window in which children can mostreadily absorb new languages. For the first 6 months of life, for example, babies can hear every sound from every language in the world.

According to Ann Senghas at Barnard's Language Acquisition and Development Research Labat Columbia University, between month 6 and month 10, our brains actually begin to pruneaway sounds that we are not exposed to frequently.

'Understanding Comes Long Before Speaking'

There have been several studies that have, in one way or another, found advantages in startingchildren off in a new language at a young age. Researchers don't know whether it is biologicalor social, but most children who learn a language before puberty seem to develop the ability tospeak it as a native would.

Francois Thibaud, who runs the Language Workshop for Children, has created a line oflinguistic software for young children. He says the method works better when the babies arepreverbal. "Understanding comes long before speaking, and speaking before reading andwriting," he says. "That's the way you learn your own language."

There are no translators in any of Thibaud's classes, because he says when we translate forchildren we actually add confusion; for clarity we should keep using the word we want them tolearn.

Multilingual Myths

Some parents fear that with all these different words and languages, their children will have aharder time picking up English or will get confused, but researchers at Dartmouth College andother institutions have found no such disadvantage to being multilingual. There are emergingtheories that the brain is designed to pick up multiple languages early in life, and that our currentmonolingual focus is actually an evolutionary aberration.

Allesandra is a teenager who started studying languages a the Language Workshop for Childrenbefore she can remember. She speaks fluent French, Spanish, Italian and English, and is working on Chinese, Portuguese and Latin … and she hasn't even set foot in a high school yet.

A well-rounded and articulate young woman, Allesandra recognizes the advantages thatmultiple languages will afford her, and still wants to pick up Hindi (the national language ofIndia) by the time she enters college.

"When I am older, I want to have an international job in something that has to do with healthcare or medicine … because I really like science too," she says. "So, I think that by knowingHindi and Chinese, I could work in parts of the world that need a lot of help."

The 'Apple' Example

Allesandra's interest and excellence in math and science is not an unusual byproduct for childrenwho are fluent in multiple languages. Research has indicated that multilingual students do as well, if not better, on standardized tests in high school than their monolingual peers.

To understand why, think of an apple, and then think of the word "apple." If you speak onlyone language, you associate the object (the apple) with that word, and only that word. But, forexample, if you know three languages and three words for "apple," the words become more likesymbols to you, similar to the symbol "x" in an algebraic equation.

There is also a theory among some Indian computer programmers that the reason so manyChinese and Indians have an easy time learning programming languages is because their brainsare already open to the idea of learning languages. Many college graduates in India are familiarwith two languages, if not three of four. And the Chinese are familiar with the nuances ofMandarin or Cantonese. It seems logical that when either group picks up a code book to learnJAVA or C++, it's just another language.

Perhaps so many engineers and computer scientists are involved in software breakthroughsbecause they've become fluent with symbols the way a poet has with words.

And perhaps some future poets of symbols and words are getting a head start as bilingualbabies.

Melia Patria contributed to this story.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

More children learn more than one language

By Beth Walton, USA TODAY

Azure Warrenfeltz is fluent in Japanese and Spanish. She also can understand bits of French, German, Arabic and Italian, and she soon hopes to learn some Mandarin Chinese. Azure is 4 years old.

"I'm smarter than my father. He can only speak one language. Muchas gracias!" she says playfully.

In today's globalized world, Azure is one of many young American children whose parents insist her education include foreign languages.

"It's such a global environment now, you never know what you might need," says Azure's mother, Julie Warrenfeltz, who started schooling her daughter in foreign languages when she was 6 weeks old. "I wanted to make sure she had every tool and every benefit at her disposal.

"She couldn't hold a violin, she couldn't stand upright, but I wanted her to do something," says Warrenfeltz, owner of Petite Ambassadors Language School in Jacksonville.

Not only is learning a foreign language easier for children than it is for adults, but children who are exposed to other languages also do better in school, score higher on standardized tests, are better problem solvers and are more open to diversity, says François Thibaut, who runs The Language Workshop for Children, which has nine schools around the East Coast. Thibaut is a pioneer in foreign languages for babies and children and is the author of Professor Toto, an award-winning home-based foreign-language curriculum for parents and children.

"When I started 35 years ago, very few people believed in this idea. Teaching kids who are 6 months seemed crazy," Thibaut says.

Today, Thibaut says, his schools can't keep up with the demand for classes; about 1,000 students are enrolled and even more are on waiting lists. The schools even get requests from expectant parents wanting to reserve a space for when their child is born, he says.

The schools serve students 6 months to 9 years old and offer courses in Spanish, French, Italian and, new this year, Chinese, which Thibaut says is becoming the most requested class.

"More and more people are aware of the importance of teaching another language to their child because we are in a global world," he says.

Language study for children is based on immersion, he says. Kids sing songs and play games to help develop language comprehension skills. "This is a natural way of learning language."

When children start learning languages at birth, they have the capacity to learn many languages at once without getting confused — because, as the brain develops, so too does the ability to separate one language from another.

Warrenfeltz says that sometimes when Azure was younger, she would mix up vocabulary words, using the shortest word no matter what the language. But by age 3, everything fell into place.

The word for "elephant" was too long and hard to pronounce in English, so at age 2, Azure would just say Zo, the Japanese word for the animal.

"It was clear to her what the objects were, but it was just so hard to enunciate, she would just pick the words that were the easiest," Warrenfeltz says.

Warrenfeltz's school takes students as young as 6 weeks in a course called Baby Boot Camp, which combines foreign language with strength training, balance and coordination exercises. She, too, has seen the demand for language classes grow in the past few years.

One of the reasons Anna Lynn and Stephan Oppenheimer of New York enrolled their daughter, Mireille, in Thibaut's language classes when she was 6 months old was to help her understand diversity and learn how to see things from

different perspectives. They also hoped the language lessons would help their daughter appreciate her heritage; her grandmother is French.

"We both believe that could be a great gift to give our child," Anna Lynn says. "As Americans, we don't typically study other languages, and that can make us narrower in our perspective."

Warrenfeltz's two younger children, Indigo, 2, and Raymond, 1, also are learning foreign languages.

"It's amazing; you never know what is going to come out of their mouths," she says. "You'll see them walking down the road counting in Chinese or pointing to things in Arabic.

"I would hope that they would become ambassadors to Japan and all those wonderful things," but whatever Azure decides to do, languages will be an asset, Warrenfeltz says. "I'm just providing an opportunity so they can do whatever they want, wherever they want. They won't be bound by language."