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Barbara Lindsey

Hearing Bilingual - How Babies Tell Languages Apart - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...11klass.html

bilingual babies languages research

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • “What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.
  • In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different.
  • Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.
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  • These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.
  • Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.
  • “This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Oct 11
     
    One of the key take aways for me is this quote: "This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting," Dr. Kuhl said. "They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way."
Barbara Lindsey

Bilingual chat - 0 views

bilingualchat.com

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 Jun 11
     
    Bilingual Chat is an online community of people around the globe who are learning foreign languages.
Barbara Lindsey

Language Log » What bilinguals tell us about Mind and Brain - 0 views

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll

watw bilingualism TED videos symposium

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • It's a darn shame, in my opinion, that the AAAS doesn't put videos of these symposiums on the web, along the lines of TED lectures and the like.  If they did that, I feel that many of the presentations would deserve (and get) tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. I've made this suggestion to several people within AAAS, but since the cultural conservatism of American intellectuals is perhaps rivaled only by that of the Saudi religious authorities, I suspect that a few decades will pass before any such thing happens.
Barbara Lindsey

Education Week: Science Grows on Acquiring New Language - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...09window_ep.h30.html

language learning brain research

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • For example, when babies born to native-English-speaking parents played three times a week during that window with a native-Mandarin-speaking tutor, at 12 months, they had progressed in their ability to recognize both English and Mandarin sounds, rather than starting to retrench in the non-native language. By contrast, children exposed only to audio or video recordings of native speakers showed no change in their language trajectory. Brain-imaging of the same children backed up the results of test-based measures of language specialization.
  • The research may not immediately translate into a new language arts curriculum, but it has already deepened the evidence for something most educators believe instinctively: Social engagement, particularly with speakers of multiple languages, is critical to language learning.
  • “The key to that series of studies is exposure and live interactions with native speakers,” Ms. Lebedeva said. “The interactions need to be naturalistic: eye contact, gestures, exaggerated phonemes.”
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  • “Human brains are wired to learn best in social interactions, whether that learning is about language or problem-solving or emotion,” Ms. Lebedeva said, “but language is such a ubiquitous human behavior that studying it gives us an example of how more general learning takes place.”
  • at the science-oriented Ultimate Block Party held in New York City this month, children of different backgrounds played games in which they were required to sort toys either by shape or color, based on a rule indicated by changing flashcards. A child sorting blue and yellow ducks and trucks by shape, say, might suddenly have to switch to sorting them by color. The field games exemplified research findings that bilingual children have greater cognitive flexibility than monolingual children. That is, they can adapt better than monolingual children to changes in rules—What criteria do I use to sort?—and close out mental distractions—It doesn’t matter that some blue items are ducks and some are trucks.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 26 Oct 10
     
    researchers long thought the window for learning a new language shrinks rapidly after age 7 and closes almost entirely after puberty. Yet interdisciplinary research conducted over the past five years at the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, and other colleges suggest that the time frame may be more flexible than first thought and that students who learn additional languages become more adaptable in other types of learning, too.
Barbara Lindsey

Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace | Epicenter | Wir... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...arabic-english-diplomacy

cross-cultural community translation online

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
  • People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
  • Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
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  • The site is effectively bilingual, thanks to machine translations, and volunteer editors spruce up the translations afterward. Machine translation is quite good, Weyman says, on fairly standard text such as news stories, but still has difficulties handling comments, which tend to use more conversational language. The site also open-sources all its translation data to help the state of the art of translation to move forward.
  • “let someone in Nebraska see an event through the eyes of someone in Nablus.”
  • For instance, Meedan partnered with the United States Institute of Peace, which hosted an online webcast with U.S. Ambassador Christoper Hill last Wednesday. The webcast allowed Iraqis and others from the Middle East to ask questions in Arabic, have them translated immediately and get answers back in just seconds.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10
     
    A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic - and vice versa - will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
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