Italian for Beginners
Babies recognize syntactic regularities in a foreign language much earlier than expected and are extremely fast.
Infants can learn at a very early stage and with surprising speed grammatical rules of a new language: In a study at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences researcher played by Angela Friederici four month old German babies Italian phrases before. As measurements with the EEG showed their brains stored within a quarter of an hour syntactic dependencies that existed between the linguistic elements, and react to deviations from the so learned patterns. Previously it was assumed that this ability until about the 18. Month of life around developed. (PlosOne, 22. 03. 2011)
The speed with which children learn languages perplexes parents and linguists again and again. In no time at all, they save new words and recognize grammatical rules that connect them in a sentence. It is well known that even very young children can recognize relationships between adjacent syllables when they appear repeatedly together. However, grammatical rules often refer to widely spaced elements in a sentence. Previously, linguists believed that the understanding of these regularities was only about the 18. Month of life evolved around. "That always seemed to me late," says Angela Friederici, director of the Department of Neuropsychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. To test the learning skills of very young children, Friederici and her staff confronted German infants aged four months with sentences from a foreign language, Italian.
These were carefully selected and contained two syntactic constellations: On the one hand, the auxiliary verb "può" (can) and a verb with the infinitive ending "-are", as in the sentence "Il fratello può cantare" (The brother can sing) , Second, a so-called gerund, a common construction in English and Romance languages, that expresses that someone is about to do something. It is formed with the auxiliary verb "sta" (ist) and a verb with the ending "-ando". An example is the sentence "La sorella sta cantando."
say: The sister is singing. According to the English "is singing").
The infants heard correct sentences after these patterns in approximately three-minute learning phases, each followed by a short test. In the test phases, they were randomly played correct and incorrect sentences, such as "Il fratello sta cantare" (The brother is singing) or "La sorella può cantando" (The sister can sing). The researchers repeated this process four times. By EEG measurements of the brain waves was clearly visible: The children automatically saved that "può" and "-are" and "sta" and "-ando" belong together. While the processing of incorrect and correct sentences initially produced very similar EEG curves, the two sentence types in the fourth round - ie after a total learning time of less than a quarter of an hour - led to strongly different activations.
"At this age, of course, no content errors are registered," says Friederici. "Long before semantic understanding, however, babies already recognize and generalize regularities on the sound surface." The brain apparently automatically filters out syntactic relationships from heard sentences and is thus able to recognize deviations from the learned patterns within a very short time.
For later language learning these early processes of rule recognition are an important basis. Interestingly enough, early language acquisition differs significantly from the way adults learn a foreign language. Adults tend to pay attention to semantic relations, that is, to possible associations of meaning in the sentence.
Original publication:
Angela D. Friederici, Jutta L. Mueller, Regine Oberecker: "Precursors to natural grammar learning: Preliminary evidence from 4-month-old infants" PlosOne, March 22, 03.
Source: Leibzig [MPI]
