Single Review on past events

Multilingualism is the world-wide norm, as there are many multilingual communities, cities, states (or organizations like the Zukunftskolleg). Yet, there are many misconceptions, such as “too many languages cause brain confusion” or “you have to learn a language well before starting learning another one”. Even in political contexts, there is the misbelief, that bilingualism hinders school success or that minority parents should speak the majority language with their children at home. Tanja Rinker introduced the audience to this amazing topic.

As neuro-scientific research has shown, there are two main regions in the brain responsible for language, the Wernicke-Area for language comprehension and the Broca-Area for the language expression. In the first months and years of life (and even before birth), the human brain develops the ability to understand and produce language. Therefore, so-call “critical” or “sensitive” time periods exist, modified by genetic bases and environmental influence, in which children learn their first or second language well.

EEG-experiments have shown, for example, that Finnish children of six months can still discriminate Estonian and Finnish vowels, but at twelve months they can discriminate their language best, but not the other one (anymore). An American study produced the result that 9-month old babies from English-speaking families which had been exposed to a Chinese native-speaker for four weeks receive the best input from an actual person talking to them and not from any media (video or audio). Another study has shown, that children between the ages of three and six, after spending two months in a French speaking kindergarten, developed the neuronal basis for French vowel discrimination. Studies not focused on phonology but on the correct use of morphosyntax have shown that amongst Chinese-English immigrants in the US with at least five years of daily contact with English the participants that had arrived in the US after the age of 16 are less competent detecting grammatical errors while the ones that arrived before the age of 11 show better skills. Also, lexical-semantic processing was less affted by age of exposure. Thus.  grammar and lexical- semantic processing may be differently affected by the age of acquisition and also the proficiency of the speaker.

In a study on German-Turkish speakers, female bilinguals use German significantly more often in childhood and adolescence than males. Also bilingual speakers were a bit slower at detecting errors in a German plural violation paradigm, again especially the German-Turkish speaking males.

The new born brain is “international”. In the first year the brain specializes towards the language of the child´s environment. This can be changed but the input needs to be of high quality and quantity.