According to a study undertaken by Infoture, children who at least 30,000 words a day from their parents and other people around are likely to excel academically as they grow up.

The study found that children who heard at least 33 million words (30,000 a day) from birth the age of 3 tend to have higher IQs at the age of 10 than those who hear fewer words. The study also found that television viewing tends to significantly decrease the amount of conversation in a home, which negatively effects children’s language and academic development.

Infoture has developed a system called LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis system) which provides parents with information about their children’s language environment such as the number of words spoken by parents and children.

The other day I found an interesting interview with Professor Laura-Ann Petitto, a cognitive neuroscientist who has spent the past 29 years seeking to uncover the biological and environmental factors that affect how humans acquire language and how language is organized in the brain. The main aim of her research is the find the biological foundations of language.

She found that the language development of children who grow up bilingually or multilingual is not delayed when compared with monolingual children, as a popular belief suggests. That bilingual and multilingual children do mix languages, just as adults do, and that they do so in a highly principled way. Language mixing is mainly a social phenomenon and the amount of language mixing among children reflects mixing behaviour among adults in their community.

She also studied the optimum time to expose children to two or more languages, comparing groups of children who were exposed to multiply languages at different ages. Some were raised bilingually from birth, others from the ages of three, five, etc. She found that up to nine years old, children immersed in a bilingual environment can become equally fluent in both languages. However if such children are only exposed to one of the languages in school, their ability in that language is much reduced.

Other interesting bits from the interview include the finding that “young children who have rich and early exposure to two languages are […] cognitively more advanced than their monolingual peers on certain highly sophisticated cognitive tasks to do with attention and abstract reasoning.” Also that those children exposed to two languages after the age of nine or so will eventually learn them, but will probably never speak them as well as the early starters.

There’s a hypothesis that we have a critical period for acquiring languages during our childhood, and that learning a language in later life, roughly after the age of 12 or 13, is difficult because of this. As a result of this theory, it’s widely believed that the earlier you start learning a foreign language, the more successful you’ll be.

According to an article I came across today, the different aspects of language acquisition take place at different times and rates. If there is a critical period, there probably isn’t one single one but many. We continue to improve our knowledge of our language(s) throughout our lives.

The article suggests that one reason why most of us find it difficult to learn new languages is because our brains have are set up to handle the language(s) we already know, and find other languages challenging, especially ones that differ significantly from our native ones.

The conclusion is that our language learning abilities decline with age, so the earlier you start learning languages the better, but “there is no particular age beyond which the effort is hopeless”.

According to an article I found today, a study at the University of British Columbia found that babies as young 4 months old can tell when someone has switched from one language to another just from visual clues, such as the shapes and rhythm of the speaker’s mouth and face movements.

Babies aged 4, 6 and 8 months from monolingual and bilingual families were shown silent videos of people speaking sentences first in English, then in French. The 4 and 6 month old babies paid more attention to the videos and watched them longer when the languages switched, which indicates that they noticed differences. By age of 8 months, only babies raised in bilingual homes were able to tell the difference between the languages.

Perhaps it would be interesting to have a language quiz or two featuring silent videos of people speaking different languages and asking you to try to work out how many languages were being spoken and even which ones. What do you think?

If you have an suitable videos, or know where they are available, do let me know.