Group items tagged

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.

Fascinating article on language learning using an app called Memrise. The company's goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything. Two takeaways for language learning, and acquiring and retaining any subject matter: 1. Elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you'll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind's eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it'll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote. Create mnemonics for vocabulary. 2. "Spaced repetition". Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don't try to cram.

Memrise is a British technology start-up that makes vocabulary learning into a fast, effective, and fun game. A million people are already learning on the platform and, with monthly active users growing at 30 per cent month-on-month, it is one of the fastest growing learning tools in the world. Free online learning and teaching site, with an associated mobile app. The language learning modules combine neuroscience principles, fun online-gaming-style leveling-up and leaderboards, and a social community. You can learn a bunch of different languages--200, in fact--from Chinese to Finnish to Arabic to French (Macedonian or Xhosa, anyone?), as well as content in other subjects: math and science, arts and literature... I'll keep you posted on whether it works by trying to learn a new language or several. I did check out the Chinese language component, and it seems legitimate so far... There's also a unit on "Brain and Mind" that would be of use to WRU students.

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

An app called Duolingo is the top app to learn a new language. The site includes learning vocab and grammar and doing exercises that are tailored to what the person learns quickly and what the person need to repeatedly review. Teaching language has changed from early "grammar translation" (learning grammar rules and translating sentences) to "audiolingualism" (learn rules and patterns by repeating sentences over and over) after World War II to other methods in the 60s and 70s that turned into a general "communicative approach" which focuses on the function of language as communication not the rules and structure. The app is mostly "audiolingual" because it drills users to repeat words and phrases over and over, but it also helps users learn a lot of words, reminds them to practice, and keeps them practicing with virtual rewards so can be effective.

Can learning another language help with studying linguistics? While languages and linguistics aren't exactly the same thing, they are more related than, say, learning how to ride a bicycle and linguistics, so learning you get from one source won't be wasted when it comes to the other.

What can you recite by heart? Your times tables? German verb formations? The Lord's Prayer? Novelist Salman Rushdie thinks it should be poetry. Speaking at the Hay Festival, the writer described memorising poems as a "lost art" that "enriches your relationship with language". David Whitley, a lecturer at Cambridge University, Whitely, whose Poetry and Memory project surveyed almost 500 people, says: "Those who memorised poems had a more personal relationship [with the poem] - they loved it for the sound and meaning, but it also connected with their life currents - people they loved, or a time that was important to them. "For people who memorise a poem, it becomes a living thing that they connect with - more so than when it is on a page. Learning by heart is often positioned as the opposite of analysis. But for many people who know a number of poems, their understanding grows over time and changes." Psychotherapist Philippa Perry agrees. She points out that memorising anything, from poems to music, means you always have it with you. She thinks that memorising poems can also be good for the health of our brains. "The way we 'grow' our brains is that we make connections between our brain cells - neural pathways. The more you exercise that network, the more you strengthen it. If you learn things by heart, you get better at it."

Description of words, syntax, etc.

Students in South Africa are thought to be at a disadvantage since they switch from learning in their native language to learning in english. Researchers, however, believe that it is more advantageous to students to learn in the language in which they feel most comfortable. Switching between the mother tongue at home and English at school is shown to be a struggle for most children. Since the simplicity of the mother tongue has no ties to english, the children are basically learning two different languages at once, trying to apply the two to one another.

Research has proved repeatedly that children undoubtedly achieve much better when they start schooling in a language linked to one they can already use quite well. Using a familiar language for schooling is a big part of such success, which is why the late South African educationalist Neville Alexander advocated for mother tongue based-bilingual education.

This article is about a study that was published about the correlation between different language learning environments and the brain activity. The results of the study showed that the brain activity when speaking a language learned from an immersion based learning resembles the brain activity of a native speaker when they speak the language. The results go to show that immersion based learning may be a better environment for language learning.

This source explains how language learning is involved in very basic learning systems that lots of animals have. Language learning falls into either declarative memory (memorize it once) or procedural memory (repeat it over and over until you get it). The research shows that you learn language in one of these two ways. The way that you end up learning in depends on when and how you learn the language.

This article challenges the idea that it is impossible to learn a second language past a certain age. It gives you steps on how to learn a new language in only 15 minutes a day, some steps are: knowing your learning style, and embracing yourself in the culture of the language that you're learning.

This article gives simple, key steps to learning a new language. Many people are learning a new language right now. Nearly 1.2 billion people in this world are in the process of developing a second language. The study shows that the most efficient way to learn a language is not in the amount of hours you put in, but how often you practice. Cramming in massive amounts of hours one day each week is not an efficient way of learning something new. You need to be immersed in the language as frequently possible. You also need to review what you have studied before. Learning it once and then forgetting is not helpful in the long run. Reviewing will help turn your learning into muscle memory. This article helps and motivates new language learners and helps them seek their end goal of speaking fluently.

The critical period hypothesis is one of the reasons that some adults are hesitant to take on learning their heritage language. The theory essentially argues that there's a biological window where language learning is the most automatic, somewhere between the age of 2 and puberty. This theory has entered our popular consciousness as a rule that you can't learn a second-language fluently when you're older. However, scientists disagree with this notion because although it will take more conscious effort, it is still possible to become fluent in another language past the "critical window." Specifically, second language acquisition becomes more difficult with age because it requires rewiring your brain to break certain habits that relate to language learning. For example, pronunciation and accent requires breaking habits related to the way you move your mouth to speak, making it more difficult to have native-level pronunciation as you grow older. Beyond neuroscience, though, research has shown that other factors, such as exposure and education influence language learning.

"Birds learn to sing their songs and babies learn to make the sounds of their language in the same way.... Furthermore, both birds and humans go through a period [critical period] when learning is best accomplished... the brain architecture supporting babbling and birdsong is similar...the same mutated gene, FOXP2, is implicated in both [birdsong and speech]."

What a find! He talks about so many of the things we've touched on, and the fact that he titles his post "Birds R Us" is just too funny. :) I like that he provides the links to the original research, too.

"The current, long-standing theory suggests that children learn their first words through a series of associations; they associate words they hear with multiple possible referents in their immediate environment....A small set of psychologists and linguists, including members of the Penn team, have long argued that the sheer number of statistical comparisons necessary to learn words this way is simply beyond the capabilities of human memory.... rich interactions with children-and patience-are more important than abstract picture books and drilling."

It's often said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Given the fact that many of the words we use in English stem from Latin and Ancient Greek words - in common with many other European languages - what is it about English that has attracted this reputation for being so fearsomely difficult?

Learning a foreign language is hard. Learning English as a foreign language is also very hard. Words in the English language that we speak, say and write without question might not make sense to foreigners because of the many "exceptions" that comes with the English language. This article discusses what makes English so challenging for foreigners to learn. In particular, it gives examples of pronunciation and spelling, emphasis, homophones, synonyms, idioms, and dialects.

I wanted to do my research on why English is so hard to learn and why it is beneficial to learn a second language as a child, however, these are two completely different research questions. This website combined the two and has allowed me to research why children should learn English when they are young as opposed to a different language. It goes in depth as to why English is so challenging as well as how children who learn a second language will be better suited for the world.