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This site is very insightful as to the differences in language development in the brain between those that learn a second language in childhood and those that learn the language as adults. It explains briefly the idea of a critical period and discusses the interesting aspects that come along with learning a second language later in life. It mentions Broca's and Wernicke's area.

Lera Boroditsky, cognitive science professor at UC San Diego notes, "...a growing body of research is documenting how experience with language radically restructures the brain. People who were deprived of access to language as children (e.g., deaf individuals without access to speakers of sign languages) show patterns of neural connectivity that are radically different from those with early language exposure and are cognitively different from peers who had early language access. The later in life that first exposure to language occurs, the more pronounced and cemented the consequences. Further, speakers of different languages develop different cognitive skills and predispositions, as shaped by the structures and patterns of their languages. Experience with languages in different modalities (e.g., spoken versus signed) also develops predictable differences in cognitive abilities outside the boundaries of language. For example, speakers of sign languages develop different visuospatial attention skills than those who only use spoken language. Exposure to written language also restructures the brain, even when acquired late in life. Even seemingly surface properties, such as writing direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), have profound consequences for how people attend to, imagine, and organize information. The normal human brain that is the subject of study in neuroscience is a "languaged" brain. It has come to be the way it is through a personal history of language use within an individual's lifetime. It also actively and dynamically uses linguistic resources (the categories, constructions, and distinctions available in language) as it processes incoming information from across the senses.

The key takeaways: 1. Ensuring rich, socially-contextualized language exposure in both languages. Pediatricians advise non-English-speaking parents to read aloud and sing and tell stories and speak with their children in their native languages, so the children get that rich and complex language exposure, along with sophisticated content and information, rather than the more limited exposure you get from someone speaking a language in which the speaker is not entirely comfortable. 2. Exposure has to be person-to-person; screen time doesn't count for learning language in young children - even one language - though kids can learn content and vocabulary from educational screen time later on. 3. It does take longer to acquire two languages than one, says Dr. Erika Hoff, a developmental psychologist who specializes in early language development. "A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you're either hearing English or Spanish," Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said. They may mix the languages, but that doesn't indicate confusion. "Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it's a sign of language ability," she said. 4. If exposed to the target languages at a younger age, children generally will sound more nativelike. On the other hand, older children may learn more easily. Gigliana Melzi, a developmental psychologist and associate professor of applied psychology, states, "The younger you are, the more head start you have," she said. "The older you are, the more efficient learner you are, you have a first language you can use as a bootstrap."

A team of researchers from Rice University and University of Maryland, College Park argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the researchers argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition, and indeed, that "it is our innate musical intelligence that makes us capable of mastering speech." They conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

The researchers of this study advance the idea that spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first. Without the ability to hear musically, it would be impossible to learn to speak. In addition, they question the view that music is acquired more slowly than language (Wilson, 2012) and demonstrate that language and music are deeply entangled in early life and develop along parallel tracks. Rather than describing music as a "universal language," they find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music in which referential discourse is bootstrapped onto a musical framework. Newborn infants' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception have often been cited as evidence that language is innate (e.g., Vouloumanos and Werker, 2007). However, these abilities are dependent on their discrimination of the sounds of language, the most musical aspects of speech. Music has a privileged status that enables us to acquire not only the musical conventions of our native culture, but also enables us to learn our native language. Without the ability to hear musically, we would be unable to learn language.

One could argue that Niʻihau Hawaiian is the closest we've got to early forms of the language spoken in the islands. However, the language may be dying out. One interviewee noted the more frequent use of English amongst younger Ni`hau residents and expressed worry that when young speakers use English, they'll start to think in English, possibly leading them to abandon the Hawaiian way of thinking, and perhaps the language. Niʻihau speakers don't use diacritical marks like ʻokina (glottal stop) and kahakō (macron), which have become invaluable aids for language learners. They do, however, use "t"s and "r"s in place of "k"s and "l"s (e.g. ke aloha= te aroha, Ni`ihau style) - something that isn't taught in universities and immersion schools. Hawaiian language scholar Keao NeSmith says there's a history there. He says missionaries were confused by the Hawaiian language when they arrived. They were determined to translate the Bible into Hawaiian, but they couldn't figure out when to swap the "t" for the "k" and the "l" for the "r". So they created a standardized alphabet that dropped the use of "t'"s and "r"s. NeSmith says Niʻihau speakers chose not to alter their spoken language. But the missionary system gained a stronghold in the rest of the islands through the 1800s. Many of the Hawaiian language documents developed during this period, including newspapers, would become a go-to repository for the revitalization of the ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi a century later as the number of native speakers began to decline.

When children start studying music before the age of seven, they develop bigger vocabularies, a better sense of grammar and a higher verbal IQ. These advantages benefit both the development of their mother tongue and the learning of foreign languages. During these crucial years, the brain is at its sensitive development phase, with 95% of the brain's growth occurring now. Music training started during this period also boosts the brain's ability to process subtle differences between sounds and assist in the pronunciation of languages - and this gift lasts for life, as it has been found that adults who had musical training in childhood still retain this ability to learn foreign languages quicker and more efficiently than adults who did not have early childhood music training. Humans first started creating music 500,000 years ago, yet speech and language was only developed 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary evidence, as interpreted by leading researchers such as Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, indicates that speech as a form of communication has evolved from our original development and use of music. This explains why our music and language neural networks have significant overlap, and why children who learn music become better at learning the grammar, vocabulary and pronounciation of any language.

Outlines the importance of early children's language development. It highlights the importance of the four main components to early language development: Phonology, Semantics, Grammar and Pragmatics. This article shows the critical period of first 5 years in development as this is the time that baby's nerve connections are being made and those for speech/communication need to be built early on so that they're inherent to learning.

Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, University of Washington researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas - the hippocampus and cerebellum - can predict children's language abilities at one year of age. Infants with a greater concentration of gray and white matter in the cerebellum and the hippocampus showed greater language ability at age 1, as measured by babbling, recognition of familiar names and words, and ability to produce different types of sounds. This is the first study to identify a relationship between language and the cerebellum and hippocampus in infants. Neither brain area is well-known for its role in language: the cerebellum is typically linked to motor learning, while the hippocampus is commonly recognized as a memory processor. "Looking at the whole brain produced a surprising result and scientists live for surprises. It wasn't the language areas of the infant brain that predicted their future linguistic skills, but instead brain areas linked to motor abilities and memory processing," Kuhl said. "Infants have to listen and memorize the sound patterns used by the people in their culture, and then coax their own mouths and tongues to make these sounds in order join the social conversation and get a response from their parents." The findings could reflect infants' abilities to master the motor planning for speech and to develop the memory requirements for keeping the sound patterns in mind. "The brain uses many general skills to learn language," Kuhl said. "Knowing which brain regions are linked to this early learning could help identify children with developmental disabilities and provide them with early interventions that will steer them back toward a typical developmental path."

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects. The study - the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence - was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2005.

Almost every language on the planet includes words that sound like the things they describe. Crash, yawn, glug… speech is just full of these onomatopoeias. And because they have their root in real things they're often easy to identify. Even a non-native speaker might recognise the Hindi "achhee" (a sneeze) or the Indonesian "gluk" (glug). Because these onomatopoeias are so widely encountered, easy to pick up, and convey information might they be the first form of language? That's the argument presented in a recent paper published in Animal Cognition. It points out that our ancestors would have begun encountering more and more noises that we could repeat. Tool use/ manufacture in particular, with its smashes and crashes, would be a prime source of onomatopoeias. Mimicking these sounds could have allowed early humans to "talk" about the objects; describing goals, methods, and objects. Might handing someone a rock and going "smash" been a way to ask them to make a tool? Perhaps different noises could even refer to different tools. Humans are good at extracting information from mimicked sounds. These sounds also trigger "mirror neurons" - parts of the brain that fire when we observe other people doing something - allowing us to repeat those actions. Seeing someone hold a rock a certain way and saying "smash" could have helped our ancestors teach the proper way to smash. But the biggest benefit would be the fact that you can communicate about these objects without seeing them. Having a sound for a tool would allow you to ask someone for it, even if they didn't have it on them. Given these advantages, it's easy to imagine how evolution would have favoured people who mimicked noises. Over time, this would have driven the development of more and more complex communication; until language as we recognise it emerged. Following this narrative, you can see (or maybe hear) how an a human ancestor with almost no language capability gradual

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

Around the world more than half (around 60 to 75 percent) speak at least two languages. Most countries have more than one official national language. For example south Africa has 11. So being monolingual like most native english speakers are, we are becoming the minority.

Multilingualism serves an extremely practical purpose. Languages change and develop through social pressures. Over time, different groups of early humans would have found themselves speaking different languages. Then, in order to communicate with other groups - for trade, travel and so on - it would have been necessary for some members of a family or band to speak other tongues. We can get some sense of how prevalent multilingualism may have been from the few hunter-gatherer peoples who survive today. "If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they are almost all multilingual," says Thomas Bak, a cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh. "The rule is that one mustn't marry anyone in the same tribe or clan to have a child - it's taboo. So every single child's mum and dad speak a different language." The article also provides a useful summary of the benefits of speaking at least one other language: bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people. Greater empathy is thought to be because bilinguals are better at blocking out their own feelings and beliefs in order to concentrate on the other person's. Bilingualism can also delay the onset of dementia and increase cognitive recovery after a stroke. And in addition to social and cultural benefits, bil

When your brain encounters sensory stimuli, such as the scent of your morning coffee or the sound of a honking car, that input gets shuttled to the appropriate brain region for analysis. The coffee aroma goes to the olfactory cortex, while sounds are processed in the auditory cortex. That division of labor suggests that the brain's structure follows a predetermined, genetic blueprint. However, evidence is mounting that brain regions can take over functions they were not genetically destined to perform. In a landmark 1996 study of people blinded early in life, neuroscientists showed that the visual cortex could participate in a nonvisual function - reading Braille. Now, a study from MIT neuroscientists shows that in individuals born blind, parts of the visual cortex are recruited for language processing. The finding suggests that the visual cortex can dramatically change its function - from visual processing to language - and it also appears to overturn the idea that language processing can only occur in highly specialized brain regions that are genetically programmed for language tasks. "Your brain is not a prepackaged kind of thing. It doesn't develop along a fixed trajectory, rather, it's a self-building toolkit. The building process is profoundly influenced by the experiences you have during your development," says Marina Bedny, an MIT postdoctoral associate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and lead author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb. 28.

Researchers have found they can go far in predicting which children with autism will eventually develop language and which will not - based on differences in brain activity when the children are infants and toddlers. The findings represent a potential breakthrough in tailoring future early intervention programs to improve communication and language even before a diagnosis of autism is possible at 18 to 24 months.

This article describes a recent study in which scientists were able to use CT scans to generate 3-D models of Neanderthal ear structures. In the past, attempts to determine whether Neanderthals used language hinged on the hyoid bone, a single piece of the Neanderthal vocal tract. However, these scientists took a different approach by looking at the ears of Neanderthals to give clues about Neanderthal language. By running the ear models through computer programs, scientists were able to determine that the Neanderthal ear's "sweet spot" included higher frequencies characteristic of consonant production, and therefore human language. This is exciting because it gives scientists another piece in the puzzle of early human language development.

This seminal longitudinal study, conducted by Goodwyn, Acredolo and Brown (2000), evaluated the benefits of purposefully encouraging hearing infants to use simple gestures as symbols for objects, requests, and conditions. Researchers measured the receptive and expressive language abilities of 103 babies via standardized language tests at the age of 11, 15, 19, 24, 30, and 36 months. Their findings suggest that symbolic gesturing does not hamper children's early verbal development, and may even facilitate it. The possible reasons underlying the results: increases in infant-directed speech, infant-selected topic selection, and scaffolding that encourages communication.