Forgotten childhood language

Studies prove that childhood language is not really erased from memory, so if you spoke Yiddish or Arabic as a child - now is the time to go back and learn the language

Do you employ a Chinese speaker as a nanny for a toddler? And if so, what are the chances that the child will remember Chinese in adulthood, even if he was not exposed to it after his early childhood years? Many studies in the field of psychology and linguistics have already indicated that exposure to language at an early age is necessary to preserve verbal abilities at the level of the mother tongue. However, at the same time, it was found that it is possible to forget a language acquired in early childhood if after that there was no contact with this language.

For example, in studies of adopted children (for example children from Korea who were adopted by parents from France), it was found that children who did not return and were exposed to their mother tongue, forgot it. Now, a new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, shows that, contrary to what was commonly thought, even limited exposure to a language in childhood has an effect on the ability to learn the language again, even after many years of separation from it, and even after the adult person cannot speak or recognize A word from childhood.

The study focused on listeners' ability to distinguish between phonemes (basic units of pronunciation. Replacing one phoneme with another distinguishes between words. For example, "gar" vs. "bitter"). All languages ​​are made up of phonemes, but different languages ​​have different and unique sets of phonemes, which do not exist in other languages. Thus, sometimes a person listening to different phonemes in a foreign language is not able to distinguish them.
A well-known example is that Japanese adults are unable to distinguish between the phoneme of "l" and the phoneme of "r". In the Hebrew language, for example, there was a difference between the phoneme of "A" and the phoneme of "E" and between the phoneme of "K" and the phoneme of "H", a difference that many Hebrew speakers today are able to distinguish, but do not think of it (for example, between "meal" and between "edited)."

Is the language really deleted?

In the current study, the question of whether a person who was exposed to a foreign language as a child for a limited time, has an advantage in adulthood in relearning the phonemes of this language, over a person who was not exposed to it as a child. If the answer to this question is positive, then it can be concluded that traces of the language of childhood are still etched in the memory, and that the language of childhood has not really been erased.

The study involved seven British participants, living in the UK, who in their childhood spent a short period outside of England because of their parents' work, and were exposed to Hindi or Zulu (for example, by a nanny who took care of them as toddlers), but reported that now they no longer remember the language. Also, four English-speaking participants who had never been exposed to Hindi or Zulu took part in the experiment, and they served as a control group.

Both Hindi and Zulu are languages ​​that include phonemes, which English speakers are unable to distinguish between (this finding is obtained in accepted linguistics tests). The interesting question is whether the subjects exposed to Hindi or Zulu in childhood will learn to distinguish between these phonemes better than English speakers who have never been exposed to these languages.

In the first stage, all participants were tested in a word recognition test in Hindi and Zulu, to make sure that they do not recognize the language. During the experiment, pairs of Hindi and Zulu syllables were played to the participants, and they were asked to indicate whether the phonemes at the top of each pair were the same or different.

It is good to expose children to foreign languages

From the results of the experiment it became clear that subjects under the age of 40, who were exposed to Hindi or Zulu in their childhood learned to distinguish again between phonemes in this language after training. In contrast, subjects over the age of 40, who were not exposed to Hindi or Zulu in their childhood, were unable to distinguish between phonemes even after extensive training. Even participants less than 40 years old, who had not heard this language in their childhood, could not distinguish between the same phonemes, even after much training.

The results of the experiment indicate that there is hidden knowledge of a language from childhood, which was apparently forgotten. However, due to the small number of participants in the study, it is impossible to attribute the finding to age with certainty, and to claim that older participants had time to completely forget the remnants of the language. To answer this question accurately, follow-up studies should repeat the experiment with a larger number of participants.

The results of the experiment also call into question the results of previous studies, in which memory of the childhood language was tested (for example, studies of children from Korea who were adopted by parents from France, and tested whether the grown-up children remembered Korean), and concluded that the language of childhood was forgotten. In all these studies the duration of the training was short, and it is possible that if the participants had been given more training time, traces of covert verbal memory could have been discovered.

To conclude, the practical implication of the research results is clear: it is worthwhile to expose children to foreign languages ​​from an early age, even if this exposure does not continue into their adult lives.

Dr. Miriam Dishon Berkowitz is a psychologist and organizational and marketing consultant.
The article was published in Galileo magazine, November 2009