This article explains that learning language actually starts in the womb, not after birth. With new technology, researchers from the University of Kansas were able to track in-utero babies' responses to American and Japanese. As the mothers had only spoken English during their pregnancies, Japanese was a completely new language to the fetuses. The fetuses reacted very differently to the Japanese than they did to the American, which suggests that fetuses are able to start learning language before they are even brought into the world.
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 source discusses how babies have such ease at learning two languages simultaneously.
Intersting findings:
- Babies begin learning language in the womb. They are more comfortable with the language(s) the mother spoke while she was pregnant.
- Code switching is actually normal and not a negative aspect of being bilingual. It just shows the ease at which one can switch from one task to the next.
This source talks about different experiments done on toddlers who were bilingual and not. The underlying findings:
- Being bilingual doesn't confuse children, they are able to understand that the languages are separate.
- Being bilingual actually has longterm effects (especially with cognitive development).