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Tuesday February 18,
2003
Feb 18, 2003
3:33 pm US/Eastern
(CBS) (NEW
YORK)
WHY KIDS ARE BETTER THAN ADULTS AT LEARNING A
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Are you struggling with your foreign
phrase book while your ten year old casually chats up the cab
driver? It doesn't mean she's a genius or that you're a dummy.
There's a perfectly good reason for that.
We all know
children lap up languages that adults have to struggle to learn. Now
for the first time, brain scientists are getting a look at why.
"We know that we get worse at acquiring language as we get
older. But until now people haven't looked inside the
head."
At UCLA, Dr. Paul Thompson used MRI's and computer
animation to study children's brains.
"You can actually make
a time lapse movie of a child's brain developing. One of the
things that you see in these movies is that in the language circuits,
there's this sort of wildfire of growth all the way through 12 or 13
years of age. Now what that suggests is that they can just soak up
language."
Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institutes of
Health, says even infants learn quickly.
"When babies are
exposed to sounds of their native language, their brain needs to
detect subtle differences."
But after age 13, the rapid
growth moves to other parts of the brain. Some brain areas actually
shrink as the brain hardwires what it's learned.
"Now this
is kind of a paradox. Often when you're good at something, relatively
small amounts of the brain are used."
But later in life, the
brain must work much harder.
"Lots of different parts of the
brain are used to analyze language and analyze sentence structure
as an adult. The frontal circuits of the brain, just behind the eyes
are really active. We’re bringing all the big guns of the brain into
learning language."
Dr. Jay Giedd says the research
raises a crucial question about the way we learn.
"Are there
sensitive times where the stakes are higher, where we really want to
be teaching children sports, or music, or languages? I think that
"sensitive periods" of learning are going to be one of the hottest
topics in all of brain science."
(MMIII, Viacom Internet Services Inc. , All Rights
Reserved)
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More The Osgood File Stories:
The
Osgood Files
Friday
April 18, 2003
Thursday
April 17, 2003
Wednesday
April 16, 2003
Tuesday
April 15, 2003 |
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